Month: November 2023

It’s Not Black and White: Addressing the Binary on the Left Side

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

November 20, 2023

It was three years before I found a bumpersticker that I liked enough to put on my first car. I was 19 and in Washington DC, lobbying for the nuclear freeze movement. It was 1983, and I was starting my work as a peace activist. There was a table in a DC church, with various progressive swag, and I bought a baby blue bumper sticker that read, “PEOPLE NOT PROFITS.” It seemed a summation of our struggle in Reagan’s war machine eighties.

People, not profits. Forty years later, I think, why not both? People AND profits!

When I was young, I lived in a world of black and white, good versus evil. It was a simple terrain to navigate. “You are either with us or you’re against us.” The us and them mentality had clear dividing lines. The misfits versus the straights. Left versus right. The oppressed versus the oppressors. Then I grew up and realized it is all shades of grey, context, and nuance. Nothing is black and white. And Ronald Reagan did a few (a few) good things.

I love how my fellow travelers on the left have worked at smashing binaries with regard to gender. Men and women are not “opposite sexes.” Gender is fluid in definition and performance. And so is sexuality. As Kurt Cobain sang, “Everyone is gay.” Well, at least a little bit. And more and more people define themselves as belonging to more than one racial category, including my daughter. We are a nation of “mulattos” and it’s beautiful. Smash the binary. Reality is intersectional!

I was at a pro-Palestine rally at Portland’s city hall this weekend where hundreds of people had gathered to call for a cease fire in Gaza. The young organizers were leading the crowd in boisterous chants, some calling for peace, but other refrains included, “2, 4, 6, 8, Israel is a terrorist state,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” I get it. I imagine that if you are a parent in Gaza right now and your child has just been killed by an Israeli bomb, you are probably not blaming Hamas. I get it. And I get that Israel is probably facing an existential crisis in this moment, as these chants grow louder and louder around the globe. “Was this the best response to the slaughter on October 7?”

I thought about the death on both sides and the hostages who may still be alive somewhere in Gaza.  I thought about how I was being pushed back into a binary. Israel versus Palestine, which side are you on, boy? I want to blur the binary, and say I’m for Israel AND Palestine. Obviously, there are people who want to eliminate Israel and/or Palestine from the face of the earth. But there are lots of people who don’t, including Israelis who have had family members killed by Hamas rockets and Palestinians who have had family members killed by Israeli rockets. I stand with them. Defend Israel. Defend Gaza.

I went through this three years ago when I was showing up for the Black Lives Matters protests in downtown Portland. Graffiti started popping up around the city that read, ACAB. “All Cops are Bastards.” I groaned, because I knew this reductionist thinking was appealing to the teenage brain, but A. It doesn’t help foster real systemic change, and B. It’s not true. Some cops are bastards and I’ve been lecturing about them for 30 years and trying to find real ways to keep them off the streets. But I know lots of police officers who are doing their work because they are dedicated to the same social justice values that I am. Maybe the left needs better slogans, or just a push to get out of its teenage brain.

Barack Obama’s political rise was based on the simple idea that America is not divided up into red and blue states. We all live in various shades of purple. We have been told we’re divided and we’ve swallowed the sales pitch fully. There are millions of Americans who are dreading the holidays, when they will be stuck at the dinner table with family members who have “opposite” views. We’re constantly being lectured about how polarized we are. All this divisiveness does not make America great. It turns the nation into a schoolyard screaming match. No member of the MAGA brigade ever turned in their red hat because some progressive called them an idiot. (And whatever the “vice versa” of that would be.)

This project I’ve been working on for the past year, Cure-PDX, is looking for ways to break through the us versus them binary that all too often spirals into political violence. We can recognize that our teenage brains want to “fight evil.” But what if there was no evil? What if it was all just ancient systems of oppression that we all get sucked into either reinforcing or resisting? A gay man suffers from the weight of a heterosexist society but also enjoys the privileges of patriarchy. Is he the good guy or the bad guy?

When the Israel-Hamas war exploded, I saw people get pulled in either direction, just like I witnessed with the “Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter” narratives that must have made every black cop’s life nuts in 2020. Then, as now, I want to embrace what is valid about both sides. There is a line that for one side to exist, the other must be destroyed. We have the capacity to reject that simplistic world view. The goal of the powerful is to divide us, conservatives versus liberals, black lives versus cop lives, Israelis verses Palestinians. That’s how the status quo is maintained.

As we head into this fractious election cycle, where some are screaming for civil war, I’m going to look for the humanity in the other side. Instead of dropping verbal bombs (or real ones), I’m going to ask questions and find where our values align. I’m going to work for peace. And I know there will be those that say this position somehow empowers the “bad guys.” I anticipate the name calling, the accusations of betrayal. But maybe, just maybe, the frightening truth is that progress comes from building bridges, not dropping bombs.

Side Note: I’m still writing an imaginary musical, called Northwest Side Story, where an Antifa girl and a Proud Boy fall in love. Maybe instead of the tragic Romeo and Juliet ending, I’ll have them move to a kibbutz on the River Jordan.

Wrapping My Head (and Fingers) Around Our Gun Culture

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

November 6, 2023

This weekend I had assault rifle, a FN-Herstal PS90, pressed against my shoulder. I adjusted for the mechanical offset of the laser scope of the rifle and put a bullet right through the heart of my target. The gun was light and the trigger action was easy. In that moment I had a flash of God-like power in a world were we all feel all too powerless.

I’ve had a long history trying to understand the appeal of guns that began when a deranged fan shot and killed my hero, John Lennon, in 1980. As kid in the South, I was buried in gun culture. From watching The Rifleman after school (“Paw!”), and the toy weaponry of my G.I. Joe, to the gun racks in the back of pickup trucks that drove around Stone Mountain. I even had a plastic Tommy gun that shot out sparks when you squeezed the trigger. But the murder of Lennon turned me into a 16-year-old gun control advocate. Why did we need all these guns?

My work as a criminologist put me back in the middle of gun culture. Whether it’s the law enforcement agents I engage with or the right-wing extremists I study, everybody is packing heat. While I’ve lectured for over 30 years on America’s bizarre obsession with guns, I’ve also worked to respect the gun and the gun owner. I fashioned sticks into pistols as a boy. Could that childhood fascination provide a clue into the fact that 32 percent of Americans own a firearm?

In 1995, when I was a fresh young PhD., I was lecturing my criminology class about the statistics on gun ownership. About how homes that contained guns were more likely to see those guns used in a suicide, a domestic homicide, or in an accidental shooting, or be stolen, then they were to ever use them to defend the home from an intruder. A had an aspiring Oregon militia member in that class who was routinely aggrieved by my anti-gun rantings and invited me to the shooting range to experience the appeal of unloading high caliber rounds into some paper targets.

Needless to say, that day we hit the range was both terrifying and exhilarating (and loud). He brought several weapons for me to try (most of them legal). By the end of the morning, I was going full Clint Eastwood, firing a 45 with my left hand and a 357 Magnum with my right. I remember the guns feeling lighter as each round was launched toward the target. And I hung that target in my university office, as a subtle message to my students, “I am not one to be trifled with.”

After the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, that left 15 students dead, I began to explore the connection between guns and masculinity. School shootings mimicked workplace shootings, where (young) men were somehow emasculated and made the fatal decision to “go out like men.” My experience shooting certainly played into some macho fantasy of myself I’d harbored since I was a skinny boy in suburbia.

In 2005, I participated in the FBI’s Citizen Academy and got more formal weapons training, including with semi-automatic rifles. It was intense, but also gave me a deeper respect of the weapons themselves. I felt like I couldn’t have opinions about guns unless I knew what it was like to fire them. That training played into that macho fantasy of myself 17 years later while I was in Ukraine, when I secretly wished a Ukrainian solder would hand me a rifle and ask me to repel some Russian invaders. Fortunately, for my family (and for Ukraine itself), that never happened.

In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. and that number only trends upwards. Over the years, I’ve considered owning a gun since my work has generated some seriously scary enemies. But I’ve always thought there were essentially two-parts of gun ownership. The first was acquiring the weapon and the second was looking for an opportunity to use it and I’m not sure that a creak in the house wouldn’t have me reaching for the ammo. And now that there is a kid in that house, guns are off the table. But, according to Pew Research, nearly 4 in 10 American adults live in a household with at least one gun in it and a lot of those homes have kids in them.

My experience at the range Saturday wasn’t just meant as a day to reclaim my inner-Rambo. I was there with members of my anti-violence team, one who is a bonafide gunsmith and brought his 45 handgun and rifle for us to fire. As soon as we entered the firing range, my heart rate shot up. About a half dozen men were firing off countless rounds, as shell casings flew through the air. It was the sound of war and mass shootings and domestic terror. But, with our skilled guide, we took our positions and fired at our targets, like I did at the Lickskillet shooting gallery at Six Flags amusement park, when I was a kid. Guns blazing around me, I focused on BRASS,  “breathe, relax, aim, stance, and squeeze,”  and tried to cluster my shots at the center of the target.

The term “gun culture” is overly broad. Yeah, it includes extremists on both the right and the left who are waiting for the call to play out their John Wick fantasies on real and imagined enemies. The faith in a soon-to-come civil war is very real to them. But there are also a heck of a lot people that enjoy the sport of shooting that includes the kind of recoil you don’t get in a video game. Going shooting helps me break through the “us vs. them” mentality I tend to have about gun owners, because now I can see the appeal. But I can also walk away from it.