Sickness unto Death

The pitiless assignment for the mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other African American mayors over the past 50 year has been to serve as cover for the reality behind the scenes. The drill is that a minority mayor will placate the deeply disadvantaged, proving the possibility of exceptions. However, the popular understanding upon which public support for police behavior rests is the perceived reality on the ground: that the minority problem—aka the Black problem--derives from an inferior people. Like slavery, which enshrined inferiority as a moral reason for enslavement, the common understanding today supports police forces that brutalize and murder across the country. Less intentionally perhaps, it amounts to social control in the face of deepening inequality.  Yet even many deeper analyses explaning reasons for police murders in Baltimore, New York and Cleveland may miss a deeper reality: the “sickness unto death,” described by Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard as “ultimate despair.”   

Kiekegaard’s “sickness” comes from an age that struggled to find integrity in a post-biblical 18^th and 19^th century that often replaced monarchy with personal and private rapacity. It was that unregulated personal aggrandizement that created the slaves, built the factories and now flood the few with the wealth produced by the many.  The police can be said to actually kill the losers in the service of the winners, a coterie to which they are unlikely ever to belong.  In plain English the police murders and urban upheavals will continue and may worsen because in the Silicon Valleys the Porsches, Teslas and Lamborghinis crowd the streets. The “sickness unto death” is a plague alive within our blood stream because the underlying problem of inequality of income, education, and quality jobs is worsening.

Perhaps, like Ms Rawlings-Blake, the police also deserve our pity because for generations that is what they think they see: a basically flawed uneducated class of people whose growing numbers of children born out of wedlock, captured by drugs, frequently incarcerated confirms both police prejudices and a despair that invites brutality.  

What they actually see, of course, is the enduring slave economy that built an America dependant on an endless supply of very cheap labor.  Now the despair deepens because much of the available cheap labor is no longer needed by the hi-tech, global economy.  What greater despair for us all than thousands of refugees without viable livelihoods  crowding on rafts and leaking ships to escape North African terror groups, then to drown at sea?

This is now our global situation. Not enough work, no money for stability, no future.   

Nothing short of a political revolution can adequately respond to this national and global crisis. Its beginnings may be in the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, expected to announce this week; or in a re-born Hillary Clinton, or a re-translated Jeb Bush.  Elections in 2016 could prove a new beginning of an end to despair by ending the growth of inequality. Kierkegaard’s spiritual language is about the self becoming true and transparently present in the eternal power of love and justice that established it. Marx’s version is that only equity can end alienation. Until this change begins we will continue to suffer the sickness unto death.