Police union letter puts pride before public safety

You’re butthurt by something someone said, by a pair of socks, so now you’re going to put your own bruised dignity ahead of public safety? Seriously?

I understand why police officers are offended by Kaepernick’s socks (which depicted cartoon pigs wearing police hats). But that doesn’t give them the right to jeopardize public safety.

As a journalist, I could get offended by a lot of what’s said about people in my profession. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop covering newsworthy stories involving those who make those comments. That’s what I’m paid to do, and it’s what I’m expected to do, ethically speaking.

In simple terms, you do your job. Period. That’s professionalism.

Professional conduct is even more crucial when it comes to public safety. How will the officers in the Santa Clara police union feel if they refuse to show up work a 49ers game and someone gets assaulted on what should have been their watch?

I know how I’d feel. Pretty damned guilty.

Yet this is exactly what the Santa Clara police union is doing. In a letter to the 49ers, the union stated, “If the 49ers organization fails to take action to stop this type of inappropriate behavior it could result in police officers choosing not to work at your facilities. The board of directors of the Santa Clara Police Officer’s Association has a duty to protect its members and work to make all of their working environments free of harassing behavior.”

“Harassing behavior”? From one guy in uniform on the sidelines? If this isn't an overreaction, I don't know what is. Kaepernick's not trying to foment a riot here, and even if he were, does anyone really think that his comments will cause a mass public uprising against police working at Levi's Stadium? Get real. Fans are far more likely to vent their anger at the referees, and when's the last time an official was assaulted at an NFL game?

According to a report by NBCBayArea, about 70 officers volunteer to work these games as security personnel, but about half of them may not show up at the 49ers' next game, on Dec. 12 – despite having agreed to do so.

Regardless of how you view Kaepernick’s behavior, he didn’t issue any threats (of harassment or anything else) toward police officers. Nevertheless, the union responded by issuing a threat of its own toward the 49ers. Worse, when union president Frank Saunders was told officers from other police forces might be hired instead, his response was to warn that such an action might run afoul of his union's contract. 

In other words: If we don't want to do the job, we'll do our best not to let anyone else do it, either.

Imagine a doctor refusing to treat a cardiac patient because he works for a company that – for instance – discriminates against women. Even if the doctor were off-duty, he or she would certainly treat someone in severe distress. And there would be no question of trying to keep another doctor from intervening because (gasp) that doctor didn't belong to a union.

Or imagine a gay firefighter walking away from a burning warehouse because it belonged to company that employed a single homophobic worker. Just one. That’s unthinkable. Yet it’s akin to what the police union is doing here in threatening to punish the 49ers for the behavior of a single employee. But who’ll really be punished if they fail to show up for work and a crime is committed? It won’t be Kaepernick or even the 49ers, it will be the victim of that crime – some individual who may even have a ton of respect for the police.

But that shouldn’t matter. The police are sworn to protect everyone, not just people they happen to like – or even people who happen to like them. In a way, their reaction to Kaepernick bolsters his point: Wasn’t he saying that some officers are more concerned with their own prejudices than they are with doing their job properly?

Kaepernick’s behavior shouldn’t enter into the equation because, no matter how offensive you may find his speech, it’s not against the law. In fact, it’s protected, so the police should be protecting his right to express himself – even if they find that expression offensive – not potentially putting others at risk because they don’t like what he said.

To his credit, the Santa Clara police chief issued a statement saying exactly this: “As distasteful as his actions are, these actions are protected by the Constitution. Police officers are here to protect the rights of every person, even if we disagree with their position. Police officers have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

The chief, Michael Sellers, emphasized that “the safety of our community is our highest priority.” As it should be.

Apparently some in the police union don’t agree – which supports the point Kaepernick's critics have been making: Don’t make blanket statements that all cops are jerks. Such statements are flat-out wrong. There are good cops, and there are bad cops. There are those who act with professionalism and integrity, and there are those who don’t. The decision on whether or not to show up for work at 49ers games will go a long way toward identifying who’s who.

Note: Paragraphs 9-12 of this entry have been updated with additional information since the initial post.

The price of violence — and our only alternative

Guns don’t solve problems. People do. Or we can when we look past our anger, our fear, our prejudice.

Fists don’t solve problems, either. Neither do knives, threats or bullying. This should all seem so very obvious, but we’re losing track of the obvious in a maze of blame and accusation that we’ll never escape if we don’t reverse course soon.

We want easy solutions that aren’t solutions at all. Most often, they only make the problems worse.

Afraid of someone? Shoot him. Easy. Problem eliminated. Right? Except now, all of that person’s friends view you as the problem and probably want to eliminate you. They have guns, too. They can get those easily enough. But more importantly, they have something you gave them: a reason to hate you.

To solve a problem, we must first understand it. But that’s too much work; we want the easy way out. Just exterminate it – or the people we believe caused it – and the repercussions be damned. Understanding is hard because it requires that we educate ourselves, that we try to see things from other people’s perspective even though we may not have experienced their pain, their challenges, their hardships.

They may even tell us, “You can’t understand. You haven’t been what we’ve been through.” But that doesn’t excuse us from trying. At best, we’ll surprise them. At worst, we’ll learn something that will increase our level of knowledge – and more knowledge is always better than less. We won’t be able to solve the problem right away, but we’ll be closer.

If we pull the trigger or dismiss another person’s pain, we’ll be further away. We’ll be promoting the opposite of knowledge, which is ignorance, because those we’ve silenced will never be able to help us understand. Those whose pain we’ve dismissed feel as though they haven’t been heard. And they’ll not only stop trying to help us understand, they’ll stop trying to understand us. And then where will we be? On opposite ends of an armed standoff, trying to blow each other’s brains out rather than using those brains as the best weapons we have against the fear and hurt that divide us.

The alternative

There is another way, if we have the courage and the patience to pursue it.

It’s hard.

When we try to understand, things get complicated, and we don’t like complicated. It’s frustrating dealing with problems you can’t solve right away, with people who don’t trust you, with bureaucracies, playing fields that are anything but level and people who are hell-bent on protecting – and exploiting – their advantages. There’s prejudice and there’s bitterness. But none of that goes away by pulling a trigger or responding with some shallow platitude and going on our merry way.

People who are hurting are hurting for a reason. We can try to shield our tender sensibilities from the hurt by placing a bandage over our own eyes, but that doesn’t make the hurt go away. It only sends a message to those who have been hurt that we don’t care.

The unheard scream, “We matter!” not because they believe others matter less, but because they feel their pain is being ignored or dismissed as unimportant.

Yes, everyone matters. But when you’re hurting and it seems like no one cares, you don’t feel like you do. Then you have two choices. You can surrender to the judgment of others and believe that you really are unimportant. Or you can reject that and say, “I do matter.” And you can take that self-worth and use it as motivation to speak a little louder, try a little harder to be heard. Until someone starts to listen, tries to understand and maybe even helps you change things for the better. Or at least stops hurting you. At least that.

Those who haven’t been heard and those who don’t want to hear have this in common: They lash out. The only way to stop this is to start hearing one another. Hearing leads to understanding, which, in time, can lead to trust.

Building trust is, by its nature, a long and tortuous process that can, tragically, be upended by the frustration and impatience that leads us to pull triggers, call each other names and stop listening. When we do, we put everything right back at square one. Because that’s the reality of this: Not only does the “quick fix” never fix anything, it destroys the entire process of seeking understanding and, ultimately, of building trust.

And it destroys lives along the way.

We have to stop shooting people. But more than that, we must stop thinking we can eliminate problems we don’t understand by invoking brute force or wishing them away. By calling names or building walls. The only way to achieve our goals is by building understanding that leads, ultimately, to trust. That’s hard work; there will be miscommunication and hurt feelings along the way. But obstacles and detours shouldn’t deter us from keeping to the path.

There are no shortcuts.

Standing up to political bullies

Vote for me. Or else.

I'm sure this is not what Theodore Roosevelt had in mind when he coined the term “bully pulpit” in reference to the presidency.

These days, presidential candidates seem hell bent on trying to bully one another – and the voters – into submission with all the gusto of an MMA athlete (minus the peak conditioning and the sense of honorable combat). They talk over one another relentlessly on the debate stage, conduct push polls, call one another names and make implicit threats.

Republican candidate Marco Rubio questions Donald Trump’s penis size, and Trump responds by labeling him “Little Marco.” Others are dismissed as stupid, weak, pathetic or wacko. Trump speaks in sweeping generalizations, declaring that Islam “hates” America and referring to Mexican immigrants as rapists. This isn’t just bigotry, it’s bullying. And Trump - whose most famous quote is, "You're fired!" - isn’t shy about doing it.

He refused to disavow an endorsement by a former leader of the KKK, a racist group that virtually epitomizes violent bullying, eventually blaming his response on a bad earpiece. A campaign rally in Chicago turned violent when fistfights broke out between his supporters and protesters. Trump’s response? Pin the blame on the protesters, whom he labeled as “thugs.”

He also asked supporters at a rally to raise their right hands and repeat a pledge to vote for him on Election Day “no matter what,” then warned them that “bad things happen if you don’t live up to what you just did.”

Intimidation and manipulation

Intimidation is the bully’s stock-in-trade. Candidates often use it in the context of a political protection racket, playing on the public’s fears by warning of a perceived threat, then casting themselves in the role as guardian or savior. Trump did precisely this when he denigrated immigrants and vowed to build a wall to “protect” us from them. But his implicit threat about “bad things” happening to supporters who don’t live up to their pledge takes intimidation to a whole new level.

Vote for me. Or else.

Trump may be the worst, but he’s far from the only bully on the block. His main rival for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz, sent out an official-looking mailer to Iowa voters labeled VOTING VIOLATION. “Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record,” it warned, adding that “a follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.”

So much for the secret ballot. Big Brother Ted is watching you.

And if you think Republican bullies are the only ones in the schoolyard, think again. A piece by Nolan Dalla describes how a caller sought to bully him into voting for Clinton by using a so-called push poll. Such phone calls seek to “push” citizens into voting for one candidate by asking questions that contain negative (and sometimes false) information about his or her opponent.

In this case, the caller labeled Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, “divisive” and declared that he had “blocked” gun-control and immigration-reform legislation (ignoring the fact that no single representative in Congress can “block” anything by himself).

I haven’t been push polled, but I have encountered Clinton supporters who don’t hesitate in attempting to bully others. Some have gone so far as to accuse those who don’t support her of misogyny. (My standard response: Did you support Sarah Palin for vice president in 2008? If not, does that make you a misogynist?)

Clinton herself even tried to bully Sanders on the debate stage by interrupting him – and he had the temerity to stand up to her by saying, “Excuse me, I’m talking,” her campaign responded with an email criticizing his “tone.”

Remember: She interrupted him.

That’s another typical tactic of a bully: accusing the victim. Interrupting someone is universally considered rude, yet the Clinton campaign tried to depict Sanders as the villain because he stood up to her.

Personal experience

Why does any of this matter to me? Because it hits close to home. I was bullied relentlessly in junior high school, and I learned how to recognize it. It’s ugly.

Even when candidates aren’t acting like bullies themselves, they often subject themselves to lobbyists and their sponsors, who practice another form of bullying: offering financial support to those they feel will support their causes. Or they count on their most passionate supporters to act as unacknowledged surrogates who’ll attempt to prod, harass or shame people into voting for them.

Do you want me to support one bully because the other one is worse? That’s not on even on my radar screen anymore. Been there, done that. The idea of being a pawn on a power struggle between two bullies doesn’t appeal to me. I value myself enough not to put myself in that position again, and I suspect plenty of other voters do, too, which is why many of them so often decide to stay home on Election Day or vote for third-party candidates.

I refuse to settle for a nation where bullying is the status quo, where the “art of the deal” is more important than public service, where push polling and influence peddling are par for the course, where I’m pressured to support one candidate out of fear the other option will be worse.

You can’t stop bullies until you stand up and declare, “I will no longer accept this.”

The ends don’t justify the means, and the lesser of two evils isn't good enough. It never was.       

• • •

Incidentally, Theodore Roosevelt, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article, ran the most successful third-party campaign in the modern U.S. history, winning more than 4 million votes to finish second, ahead of the Republican candidate.

His attitude toward bullying indicates he wouldn't have thought much of today's candidates. "Ridicule is one of the favorite weapons of wickednes," he once said and, on another occasion, "Politeness (is) a sign of dignity, not subservience."

About that phrase he coined: “bully pulpit” … for the record, he used “bully” the way it’s used the in the expression “bully for you” – as a synonym for fantastic, wonderful or jolly good.

None of which, I hasten to add, applies to the state of political discourse in these United States, circa 2016.

 

Strict dress codes send our kids a message: We care about your appearance, but we don't believe in you

We’ve got it backwards.

Somewhere along the line, some of us decided to trade personal responsibility and freedom of expression for “the devil made me do it”-style passing the buck. We decided that accountability wasn’t important – that it’s better to judge the proverbial book by its cover than to bother reading a single word inside.

Here’s what got me going today: A school district in Clovis, California, right next to my hometown, tried to keep a student from enrolling in classes because he wears his hair in a short ponytail. He wasn’t just any student, but an honors student with a 5.0 grade-point average who said he wanted to honor his cultural heritage.

But his motivation shouldn’t matter. Cultural. Religious. Artistic. I couldn’t care less about his motivation it, as long as he’s not a terrorist or gang banger. What I do care about is that the school is abdicating its core mission: Teaching young people how to forge an adult identity – something they’ll never learn if they don’t have a chance to express themselves.

Pride.

Responsibly.

Without excuses.

"DISTRACTIONS"

It’s easy to make excuses, to say that a student isn’t learning because he or she is “distracted” by a peer’s appearance. Excuse me for saying so, but that’s an insult. Kids are smart enough to know they can study just fine, thank you, when someone’s wearing a colorful shirt, a beard, a pair of earrings or long hair. And they’re disciplined enough to do it, too – especially when adults expect it of them.

But we don’t. Instead, we expect them to fail just because someone else has a few hairs “out of place” (by our standards) or has the audacity to wear a T-shirt that might just prompt someone to think outside the tight constraints of the administration’s imaginary box. “You’ll be too distracted,” we tell them, “to be able to learn.”

Guess what: If kids can’t learn because they're 'distracted' by some guy’s wearing facial hair, they won’t be able to function in a professional world that places a premium on broad skill sets and the ability to adapt. Distracting? You bet. They’d be better off getting used to that kind of distraction and, wouldn’t you know it, they can handle it – better than many of us imagine.

CONFIDENCE

It’s only when we stop having confidence in our youth that they dumb themselves down and stop listening to us. Why should they listen to people who expect them to fail in the face of some perceived external obstacle – even something so minor as the way a person dresses.

Instead of encouraging them to focus on their goals and take pride in their achievements, here’s what we’re teaching them: to stop trying and scapegoat others for their failures. Do we really want to be complicit in this? Do we want to be the ones who teach them that a book’s cover is all that matters? That style is more important than substance?

If we tell them that a classmate’s clothing can “make” them fail academically, how different is that than telling them a woman’s clothing can “make” a man rape her?

The fallacy here is that we’re faced with an either-or situation, that we must either raise a bunch of irresponsible hippies who never contribute anything to society or a generation of imperial storm troopers in identical white armor.

That’s a false choice based on a lack of confidence in our kids – based, for some of us, on the assumption that their creativity is a threat to everything we’ve achieved. We accuse them of being undisciplined, of having no taste in music, of wasting their lives. For all our talk about making the world a better place for our children, we sometimes fail to realize that the best way – ultimately, perhaps, the only way – to do that is to empower them to make it a better place for themselves ... and we do the exact opposite.

SCAPEGOATS

We teach them to scapegoat others, which is the antithesis of empowerment.

But it's easy because what we all too often do ourselves.

We stop living our own lives, and two things happen: We make others (minorities and immigrants; those “others” who don’t look like us, practice our religion or speak our language) into fall guys for our failures. Meanwhile, we live vicariously through the clones we place on cardboard pedestals – celebrities, athletes and politicians, but most of all, our kids. Objects all of our own wish fulfillment.

Our kids, of course, aren’t clones or “mini-mes,” and we’re no better than those obnoxious parents who shout obscenities at Little League games. We teach them to play the game our way, then express disappointment when they ultimately decide to be writers or artists instead. In the meantime, we occupy ourselves by screaming at the poor scapegoated umpire to “go find a pair of glasses!” when that last strikeout’s our fault for forcing our kids into a mold that never fit them.

LESSONS

I’m thankful my parents never did that. They encouraged me to play basketball in junior high, but they never objected when I decided not to pursue it further.

And my high school never told me I couldn’t attend classes because I grew a full beard during my senior year (when it looked very much the same as it does in the photo accompanying this article, taken at my college commencement ceremony). No one ever complained that it was a distraction, and as for me, I blasted through my final semester with straight A’s.

If I’d been in Clovis, I might have been barred from enrolling in class.

We have two choices. We can empower our children to surpass our achievements, or we can enslave them to our ultimate obsolescence.

My own hope is that we equip our kids to go in search of lands yet undiscovered on roads less – or not yet – traveled.

On the trek that is our shared human journey, that will make all the difference.

Our addiction to outrage is destroying us

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore." - Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network

Outrage. Rage directed outward. As a society, we seem to have become addicted to it. But as with almost any addiction, it's sapping our strength and distracting us from living our lives together in some semblance of community.

There was a time when crime and natural disasters topped the local news. "If it bleeds, it leads." But that principle seems to be giving way, increasingly, to a new trend, with prominence being placed on stories that either 1) create new outrage or 2) pour salt on the still-open wounds of past indignities be reporting on new offenses of the same sort.

Addictions can sap our strength, demoralize us, make us feel like prisoners, and our addiction to outrage does all these things. We're demoralized because outrage takes an enormous amount of emotional energy to sustain. We tell ourselves this is necessary because of the magnitude of the offense, and sometimes it is. If we weren't outraged at things like the Japanese internment, racism, sexism, the Holocaust, it would call into question our sense of compassion - and open the door for similar abuses in the future.

But an addiction to outrage is different. It demands that, when one issue is dealt with, we find a new object on which to focus our indignation. For most of us, this can be draining and produce a sense of despair if we don't get our way. As drug addictions progress, the highs fade and the level of dependence rises. The same thing happens with an addiction to outrage: "Victories" are often difficult to achieve, and each one seems less significant as we find some new affront that demands our attention.

My way is the only way

The word "righteous" is so often paired with "indignation," and with good reason. Outrage is based on a firm conviction that the other side is wrong. And this conviction can lead to the kind of arrogance that cuts off dialogue and ends any possibility for peaceful resolution. The outrage itself, rather than the reasoning that inspired it, becomes the motivation for pursuing first one cause and then another. "Because I believe it strongly" becomes "because it's right," which becomes "because I said so" and sometimes, ultimately, "because God says so." 

Those who are addicted to outrage adopt a sense of tunnel vision, just like any other addict. The high becomes the only goal; nothing else matters. This is why addicts break laws, trample on others' freedom and strive to control others, either by manipulation, threat or force and outright tyranny. Drug addictions often lead to an increase in crime and violence; an addiction to outrage can, in the same way, lead to violations of those and other boundaries.

The ability to focus one's attention intently on a cause can be transformational. We need activists who channel outrage into a force for needed change. What we don't need is an entire nation of outrage addicts shaming and shouting at one another, fueled by such high levels of dependence and frustration that their outrage has become hatred. Contempt. Vindictiveness. And that's what we're rapidly becoming, on both sides of an increasingly daunting ideological chasm.

Used properly, outrage can be a prescription for change. But like any prescription drug, it can cause severe damage if used without any kind of prudence or restraint. Channeling outrage into fighting for a cause is one thing. It's quite another to go out looking for something to feel outraged about in the hope that we can "change the world" and thereby soothe our damaged egos.

I'll be honest. I've done that. And judging from the behavior of more and more Americans, I'm far from the only one.

Can we put the outrage genie back in the prescription bottle where it belongs? I can't answer that, but I believe our future as a nation may depend on it.

Bullying for a cause: You don't get to make me feel sad

The savage and heinous assaults on innocent civilians in Paris that took place on Nov. 13 have unleashed a predictable torrent of self-righteous indignation on social media. 

• "Facebook's providing this really cool French flag overlay. Why aren't you using it on your profile picture? Are you heartless?"

• "Do you really think using changing your profile is going to accomplish anything? You're just trying to make yourself feel better. Quit being so shallow."

• And my favorite: "What about all the people who died in those terrorist attacks in Kenya and Beirut? Why didn't you change your profile picture then, you xenophobic so-and-so?"

Ah, social media. The place where good intentions somehow become bad vibes as users rush to judgment like jackals on a feeding frenzy, laughing in ridicule at people they call their "friends" as they feed on the corpse of human tragedy. If that sounds harsh, it's intentional. Because this is what people look like when they go around demanding that their friends be sad.

My response to all this: Who are you to tell me why to feel sad? Come to think of it, why do you want me to feel sad in the first place?

It seems to me the height of arrogance for one person to tell another, "If you feel sad about this, you must feel sad about this other thing, too. And not just sad, but equally sad. Heck, more sad, because it's more important to me."

Compassion should know no boundaries. It shouldn't be dependent on where we live in the world, what color our skin is or whether we worship (or decline to worship) this or that deity. But demeaning someone for showing compassion in one case and failing - according to your definition - to show it in another won't resolve anything. What it will do is make compassionate people angry at and wary of one another. Instead of railing against each other, shouldn't we be focusing on the problems that are making people sad in the first place?

News flash: Most people don't enjoy being sad. Or outraged. Most people want exactly the opposite. They want happiness, support and respect. Heaping tragedy upon tragedy and demanding that people be sad or outraged about each new one in turn won't heal us from those that have already occurred or prevent others from happening down the road. It's going to do the opposite. It's going to make people numb and indifferent.

I'm sorry, but you don't get to make me feel sad, no matter how worthy your cause or how justified you may feel in your judgments. And if you think calling me racist or xenophobic or ignorant or insensitive is going to help your cause, go right ahead, because, you see, I know it won't. All it will do is encourage me to tune you out. That's what people do when people start calling them names.

People don't like being attacked - even in the name of what someone else considers "a good cause." Those of us who have been bullied know from experience that our tormentors often hide behind "good causes" to justified their actions. When someone tries to "convince" us by using force, guilt or manipulation, we stop listening to the message and pay attention to the method. People who use such tactics often do so because they're trying to hide some deficiency in their argument. Most of us won't even analyze their motivations to that extent. We see what we perceive as a threat, and our fight-or-flight response kicks in.

Sometimes, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease. Sometimes it gets ignored and just falls off. And sometimes it gets replaced altogether.

It's inhuman cruelty we're trying to stop here, not compassion. If someone shows compassion, and you say, "Yes, but," I can't see how that helps the situation. Awareness doesn't come through judgmental declarations (which, incidentally, the purveyors of fear and cruelty are very good at making themselves), it comes by spreading compassion. And compassion never spreads through demands and accusations. It spreads through encouragement and empathy.

So please, if someone's sad about something, don't jump down that person's throat and say, "Yes, but what about (fill in the blank) ... ?" Meet compassion with compassion. That's the way it grows.