WAITING WITH FERGUSON

Waiting for the Ferguson grand jury to return with their much anticipated "no indictment" decision can be a bit distracting while planning my football watching schedule today, Sunday. As it is, my supply of chips and dip is depleted and my beverage allotment has been curtailed due to my fixed income budgetary concerns. Life is hard ain't it?  If I wasn't so lazy I could walk right out my front door and mosey down to the nearest grocery which is about 4 1/2 miles as the crow flies and pick me up some emergency potato chips with ridges and get me some of that cheddar and horseradish dip and perhaps a 6 pack without ever worrying about being shot while walking through neighborhoods where nobody knows me- no cop would slow up behind me to watch my slow deliberate striding- at 62 I'm not as spry as I was-

come to think of it I don't think I was ever a spry type- and unless my wife called 911 to report me missing- a gray-haired somewhat disheveled slouched strider who after 2 heart attacks took an early retirement, sold his favorite pick-up, and now spends all day with his best friend, Willie, a lab mutt, at home waiting for his wife to return from her day job with our one and only vehicle, no one would ever take a second glance as I shuffle by. An old white guy going for some dip. Maybe a salsa, too. The only times I can remember being afraid to venture out was in my childhood, oh maybe sometime around 5 or 6, and there were stories going around my neighborhood in Queens, NY about evil foreign-speaking janitors kidnapping children and offering poisoned candy- real Brothers Grimm stuff. Anyway I had an older cousin who I insisted accompany me home. The threat soon passed with my childhood. The only other time I felt threatened while walking was so many years later in another town. Columbus, Ohio of all places. I had attended college there for a couple of years and was returning one early Sunday morning to visit some friends on my way west one spring when emerging from the bus depot downtown I crossed what was a very quiet and very deserted street. I mean its about 6AM, its Sunday morning in Columbus -over 40 years ago, now, not a creature was stirring- not even the cop sitting against a lamppost on the other side of the street I was crossing. Until he started waving his forefinger in my direction. I hadn't a clue. He: "where are you going?" Me: "toward campus" He: "Do you know why I pulled you over?" Me: "No, was I going too fast?" He:" You're from New York?' Me:" Yes.." He then proceeded to read me the riot act and we started to walk together in the direction of the precinct jail as he was going to arrest me for jaywalking. He didn't like my attitude and my "New York" accent. "You New Yorkers think you can do anything. Well I'm going to teach you a lesson." And we walked  for a good 20 minutes or so it seemed and got right up to the jailhouse door before he decided that I had learned my lesson and let me go. For but a brief sighing second I thought better than to turn my back and walk away from him but in that same flash of time my lazy head is all the time thinking, "Nah..he wouldn't. I'm white". Privilege has its place. Even if you're from New York. And yet... for most of my life I've lived and worked in New York City. And I even managed to find some lasting friendships along the way and for that I am a very fortunate man. And these friendships are with a wide range of individuals from different walks and places and cultures and even neighborhoods and up until very recently (ok, within the last decade or so) I never even considered or never thought to ask or never thought period that one of my closest friends, a Black man, would have been subject to not one but several public search and frisk procedures so enamored by the NYPD- it could happen anytime -then?- while walking to the grocery, to work, to the store, waiting outside for his wife- anywhere, anytime and did and he never mentioned it for the longest time. The only time I was ever frisked and bodily searched was when I was doing research for another friend- a Unitarian pastor who was a distinguished scholar and writer and  having met through a mutual acquaintance he asked me to help him with a book on the American-Christian Palestine Committee which required periodic visits to the "Zionist Library and Archive" which was located at the time in 515 Park Ave. which housed several Israeli and Zionist groups and was literally guarded by Israeli security personnel who insisted on searching my dubious presence. Each time I went. I was merely inconvenienced by obnoxious Israelis who talked in accents of my wife-at the time- who was also Israeli - I was more embarrassed by their rudeness. My friend's "procedure" ,the undergoing , is humiliating enough in a power-implied gesture with a four-hundred year old brutality behind it and as my friend explained he was too upset and too angry to tell some of his friends. "We" wouldn't and couldn't understand all that that was to him. Its part of that Black-white divide in this country that is never really bridged- call it the cost of history. So while I'm out of chips I never take for granted that long walk to the grocery- and back again. But 4 1/2 miles each way I'll miss the game easily and won't be back til the last quarter of Sunday Night football, so whats the point?