"To Protect and Serve": article draft by Roosevelt Fitzgerald

TO PROTECT AND SERVE BY ROOSEVELT FITZGERALD
I couldn't have taken a beating like that. I'd be dead. Even the the police chief admitted that they hit him 53-56 times and they hit him everywhere; on the head, legs, ankles, body, back, neck, face, arms, groin, shoulders, chest and all those other places that are notated on the chart found hanging on the wall in any decent anatomy and physiology class.
The blows that he took were not just your ordinary "let's beat him up" blows. No. They were much more than that. They were not even your "let's cripple him up" blows. N. They were far more than that. Why, those blows were not even your "let's paralyze him for life" blows. I've seen all those kinds of blows and more, before. Those blows were different and not just a little different. Let me tell you how ferocious they were. An hour or two earlier I had watched the Headline News on CNN and during the sports segment there was quite a lot about baseball spring training. Batting practice. They really laid the wood on those balls but not a single batter who was shown swung harder than those policemen when the swung on Rodney Glen King. If they had they would've knocked every ball out of the park. Did you see it? Couldn't you feel the blows? What did you think? How did you feel?
I couldn't have taken a beating like that. I know it. I'd be dead. When I first looked up and saw that on the screen of my television I was certain that it was another foul up of Prime Cable. You know how often you're watching one thing and they get the channels all crossed up. One day earlier I was watching the news and the next thing I knew there was Flipper. Another time I was watching something and suddenly there was an X-Rated movie on the screen. That kind of thing happens all the time. So, when I first looked up and saw that beating scene on the screen I was sure the channels had -crossed up and I was watching some scene from some
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cops and cobbers movie. Didn't bother me a bit. I've become numb to such gratituous violence in the movies. That's how movies show the law being enforced--brutally and all the while society says to young people to not use violence to settle disputes. So much hogwash. So much hypocricy. Its just too bad that a lot of people who grow up watching such episodes in the movies incorporate them into their value systems and then, after they've grown up, some of them become policemen and think that what the Dirty Harrys of the world do represents good police work.
When I realized that what I was seeing was the real thing—that this was not make believe but some poor slob getting the shit beaten out of him by L.A.'s finest, like the remainder of the millions of decent human beings who saw it, I was shocked and outraged. I was so mad that I cried. I couldn't stop. Without realizing it I was unconsciously thinking that what was happening to Rodney King could've been happening to any black many anywhere in the United States. I was thinking that it could've been happening to me. I was thinking that I couldn't have taken a beating like that.
Long after the episode had been replaced by a commercial break and something about a GULF UPDATE had appeared on the screen, I could still see that image of that beating and even as I did so my mind reeled backwards through time and I saw that scenario repeated a thousand, no a million or more times; some black man somewhere surrounded by something not better than a pack of wild dogs whose sole intent was to snatch his life away. I became Everyperson at that point--everyperson who had ever been beaten, everyperson who had ever had a loved one murdered by a mob whatever the size of the mob, everyperson who ever lay awake through the night worrying if a son or a husband or a father or an uncle or a cousin or whoever might
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might not be lying along the side of the road in a ditch beaten to a pulp by some unmanageable force.
Its amazing what all you can see when you close your eyes. Suffering seems to be stocked up in crates just waiting to be shipped out. Pain seems to be sitting in a waiting room waiting for some unsuspecting person to come along. Hurt seems crouched on a hillside waiting to leap on whoever passes underneath. Death, which awaits us all, seem to be in hot pursuit of some.
Things go wrong. Sometimes when things go wrong they just keep right on going wrong. I've had terrible things happen to me in my lifetime. I remembered, as I sat there, when I was a young man, on my way to Mass to serve as an altar boy on a bright Sunday morning and being accosted—make that attacked--by three grown white men and I was just a kid and they set upon me and beat me and beat me and beat me. No. I hadn't done anything either and, sure, I know everybody say they were framed. Some of us actually were. I prayed for them to stop but that prayer, like so many before and since went unanswered. Sure, I know that there's somebody who'll be quick to say that they eventually stopped beating me and how could I say that their stopping was not the answer for which I had prayed. To that person I say that the time for a prayer to be answered is when it really matters. When the pain that is being experienced is justaposed next to the good feeling experienced before the pain arrived is the point when pain needs to stop. Next to a good feeling pain is unbearable even when it is borne. Once all of the good feeling has been beaten out of you and only pain is left, who needs a prayer answered. At that point one has become numb to the pain. The pain no longer is bothersome. The pain has become normal. One almost embraces it. Still, the beating that I took when I was a child was not like Rodney's. I was only hit with fists and feet and knees. I couldn't
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have taken a beating like that. I'd be dead.
I watched that episode appear again and again on television through the night. My anger was joined by fear. I was at home but, sooner or later, I would have to leave; to go to work, the store, many places. I would have to drive. Would it be my turn next—my turn to be chased, stunned and beaten by somebody—anybody?
A few nights ago I listened to President Bush's address to the nation. He described one scene from the Gulf War where some Iraqui soldiers came crawling out of their bunkers with their hands raised and with tears streaming out of their eyes and some American soldier said to them, right on television; "It's ok. We're here now." Wat a scene. The President went on to say: "Americans are a gentle people..." They're gentle with everybody except us. We, black men, get treated worse than anybody on the face of this planet and right here in our own country and I don't see it getting any better.
I can't take a beating like Rodney King did. I'm not going to bother anybody. I'm not going to break any laws but if anybody bothers me in a pain inflicting way, I'm just going to kill them and be through with it.