By Steve Halpern
The other morning, I opened up our Philadelphia Inquirer to see the lead story. This was about a report that claimed to look at why the Philly police department tear gassed peaceful protesters this past June. I happened to attend one of the peaceful demonstrations that was teargassed. I headed for home before the police teargassed the demonstrators.
Apparently, with all the problems Philadelphia is experiencing, the city paid Ballard Spahr LLP and AT-RISK International Inc. to conduct this make-believe investigation. What was the conclusion of this study?
According to the Inquirer, the report argues that, “the city’s actions through early June as the most aggressive Philadelphia response to civil unrest since the 1985 MOVE bombing.
The police initially argued that they needed to use teargas on Rout 676 because of the aggressive behavior of the demonstrators. That was until the New York Times released a video that was clear evidence of absolutely no aggression by the demonstrators.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw responded to these charges with the statement that during those demonstrations the police were, “woefully understaffed.”
Well, I attended one of the demonstrations that the city teargassed after I left for home. Before the demonstration, Mayor Jim Kenney made a statement hoping that this action would be peaceful. Given what happened on the following day, we know that the police were preparing to mobilize to harass a peaceful demonstration.
At Broad and Vine Streets on May 30, I witnessed a line of bicycle police separating one peaceful section of the demonstration from another section of the peaceful demonstration. Then, I witnessed a phalanx of about fifty SWAT team members marching in formation dressed in black, armed with clubs. They marched towards the peaceful demo and appeared to have the intention to cut right through.
Later in the day, the police arrested a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer while her press credentials were clearly visible. The police handcuffed her and kept her on a bus for two hours.
Since people in power felt they were “woefully understaffed” to provoke peaceful protesters, the National Guard came to Philadelphia armed with semi-automatic rifles, as well as armored vehicles.
After I returned home that day, I learned from reports on the television that the police were mobilizing in cities throughout the country to harass peaceful demonstrators. While the police had no reason to use teargas, the demonstrators had a legitimate right to be enraged by the murder of George Floyd, and many others by the police. After all, the salaries of the police are paid for by taxpayers who were being teargassed.
What is the history?
In order to place this story in context, we might quote from the founding document of this country, The Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
So, the fact that police murdered thousands of citizens, and teargassed peaceful demonstrators appears to be a contradiction of that sentence. However, there is more.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died during the Civil War to end the horrendous system of chattel slavery. After the Civil War, the government amended the Constitution to include all men who lived here. The Fourteenth Amendment argued that everyone is supposed to have “equal protection under the laws.”
Every day, teachers ask millions of students in this country to stand up, place their hands on their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance that argues how, in this country, there is “liberty and justice for all.” Perhaps murdering and teargassing civilians might be judged as contradictions to those words.
The facts are, that in spite of those words, the history of this country has gone from chattel slavery, to Jim Crow, segregation, to the mass incarceration we see today. So, after all the studies, legislative initiatives, and even an African American President, routine racist discrimination continues with respect to education, employment, housing, health care, as well as the enforcement of the law.
One strategy that has not been used was the one proposed by Malcolm X who argued for Black people to take control of their own communities. I saw a glimmer of what that would mean later in this same day.
Getting my COVID-19 vaccine
Because of the pandemic, we are all looking for ways of getting vaccinated. My wife, Judi contacted the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium. We both registered with their service and had our first Moderna Vaccine.
We got our vaccine at the Deliverance Evangelical Church that is located in the African American community of North Philadelphia. This happens to be former sight of the home of the Philadelphia Phillies, Connie Mack Stadium.
From what I could tell, all of the people working at vaccinating hundreds of people were African American. Everything went smoothly and all the workers were courteous. In fact, vaccinations at this sight appeared to be better organized than in other areas of the city. Given all the tasks that needed to be completed in order to organize these vaccinations, this effort appeared to be highly successful.
So, the question to be asked is: How are these two stories related? Why is it that the police have been known to murder and teargas civilians, but when Black people are in charge, everything runs relatively smoothly?
The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Currently, I’ve been reading the book The German Ideology by Marx and Engels. How in the world could this book be relevant to what is happening in Philadelphia today?
Marx and Engels studied philosophy in Germany. In this book, they reported that the philosophers of their day developed their ideas totally divorced from the reality they viewed every day. However, those philosophies were about looking for ways of rationalizing that reality, and not about changing it.
So, we see a similar problem when the Pledge of Allegiance argues that there is “liberty and justice for all,” while the police murder and teargas civilians.
However, Marx and Engels liked to look at the root cause of the problems of workers. They argued that throughout history there were ruling powers, and then there were the people who produced wealth. There were slaves and owners of slaves. There were peasants, craft workers and lords. Today, in the capitalist system, there are workers and employers.
So, when the framers of the Declaration of Independence argued that “all men are created equal” and that we are supposed to have certain “inalienable rights,” they weren’t thinking about what it means to work for a living. As we know, employers have a way of advancing a, do it their way or hit the highway, style of democracy.
Because of the nature of capitalism, employers are always obsessed with cutting costs. This leads to their drive to discriminate against African Americans, women, immigrants, as well as Native Americans. They do this while arguing that they are vehemently opposed to discrimination. As Marx and Engels argued, there is the idea, and then there is the reality.
Malcolm X understood the words of the abolitionist Martin Robinson Delaney who argued:
“A people, to be free, must necessarily be their own rulers: that is, each individual must, in himself, embody the essential ingredient—so to speak—of the sovereign principal which composes the true basis of liberty.” So, when we look at the actions of the government and their police, against the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, community control appears to be a clear alternative to the madness we see every day.
We might also consider a few more facts. The states of Pennsylvania and Ohio have populations that are similar to the population of Cuba. The cities of New York and Los Angeles have populations that are less than Cuba. In all those locations there have been over 10,000 COVID-19 deaths. In Cuba, the number of COVID-19 deaths has been 180. While the Black and Latino communities in this country have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, Cuba is 100% Latino and about 40% Black. Why is there such a stark difference between the United States and Cuba with respect to the pandemic?
Cuban expenditures on health care are a tiny fraction of the money spent on health care in this country. In fact, the United States leads the world in the most money spent on health care per person. However, Cuba has three times more doctors, per capita as this country. Cuba has also been training students to become doctors, free of charge, from all over the world.
Literally every Cuban has been visited by a health care worker, at least once, during the pandemic. Cuban scientists have developed treatments and vaccines to battle the pandemic. Cuban doctors have also travelled the world to treat COVID-19 patients. Thinking about this stark contrast in health care between Cuba and this country, I believe that the words of Martin Robinson Delaney become even more profound. “A people, to be free, must necessarily be their own rulers”
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