Bubbles

I'd left my utility jar at home and was already late picking up my friend's first-grader grandson to drive him to school. So, when I had to respond to nature's impudent call and the nearest place to properly take a leak was a bathroom in a park that was 50 yards away but out of view of the road, I had to commit a quality-of-life crime against the community by pissing the bark and roots of a tree that was popular for political vigils and ritual incantations. 

Since I couldn't leave the kid alone and was wise to the new wave of emboldened, bail-immune carjackers staking out the area, I had no choice. I produced what must have been thousands of golden bubbles, though I took no census. Each one a metaphor. 

I hypothesized each bubble represented a different intractable problem in the world. More than the combined pre-spun cases on the International Criminal Court's docket and the hypocritical belches of indignation from the conclave of United Nations shopaholic diplomats during their annual incursions in town.

Being both the arbiters and avengers of past and present conflicts while fulfilling the elusive mission of righting the real or imagined wrongs of established history and simultaneously posing themselves on the right side of history as it's being rolled out by current events, is a bitch of a multitasking challenge.

Those who seek to heal the world should first stop lacerating it with the heresies of hearsay. The surest way to reinfect the wounds of history is to stitch them up with the threads of selective memory. International forums are virtuosos at that.

The injustices of history cannot be reversed or corrected, but there must be action beyond simply identifying them. Good will, even when limitless, is doomed to inadequacy. But who can be trusted to be in charge?

And now the curtain rises on the drama of reparations.

The New York City Council recently passed a legislative package that "would establish a Truth, Healing and Reconciliation process on slavery within New York City … a reparations study, informational signs at the City's first slave market, and a task force to consider the creation of a 'freedom trail' commemorating abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad sites.”

All these ideas should be approved by the unanimous consent of the enlightened population. Bringing them to fruition may be tricky.

Although at least eight generations have come and gone since slavery in New York City was ended in 1827, its legacy is an eternal conflagration on our collective memory. As such it abidingly consumes the conscience that we should all share.

Council Member Farah Louis observes that "the reparations movement is often misunderstood as merely a call for compensation.” Her bill (Intro 279-A) "recommend[s] potential legal, policy, and other measures to help remedy or redress associated harms. The study would also propose eligibility criteria for receiving reparations.”

Depending on what specifically would be involved in the notoriously elastic umbrella term of "compensation,"  the implementation may consist of equal parts of danger and necessity. 

How would reparations work?     

Germany could never in a thousand years never pay off its debt to its Holocaust martyrs, but after proving by extensive and exhaustive documentation beyond doubt, that they survived death camps like Auschwitz or had all their money, property and other material assets stolen by the Germans, forever traumatized Jews were awarded token stipends which helped them with their rent while making Germany look good on the world stage.

The Holocaust was comparatively recent. Perhaps there is no difference between living memory and ancestral memory. Or between collective guilt and collective responsibility.

The reparations from Germany are like pensions that are non-transferable and stop when the beneficiary dies, even though their children and grandchildren are not yet, and never could be made whole from the effect of what their elders endured.

It is arguable whether, like taxes which people must pay even when they are used for purposes that don't serve them directly, such as maintenance of roads for non-motorists, reparations disbursed by the government should be payable to the descendants of slaves by present-day posterity of those slaves. 

Sometimes, the lessons of history cannot be metabolized by the soul of future generations without carefully controlled departures from the chronicled facts. 

How many Black people in New York City can with verifiable genetic evidence state with categorical certainty that their ancestor of at least 200 years ago was a slave in New York City? If they were subjugated in the South, should reparations, if due at all, not be a liability of those states or maybe the federal government, rather than specifically New Yorkers?

Would recent immigrants be eligible?

It is specious to argue that whites and Asians are no more to blame for American slavery around eight generations ago than are Blacks for the famine in Ireland, the pogroms in Poland or the rape of Nanking, etc. 

Although slavery itself has been abolished, its effects continue to malignantly inform our modern generalized culture and subliminally influence public policy. If that is true, the embers of its dehumanizing legacy have never been extinguished. 

But are there today any laws in any jurisdiction of our nation that countenance, tolerate or otherwise advance the spirit of slavery? Not blatantly, but the effects are still being felt, though they are hard to quantify and isolate. To the extent they can be definitively traced, there should be compensation where a victim's lineage is verifiable.

This should be in the form of expanded access to educational and job training programs with a goal of readying participants for positions to be awarded on the basis of competitive merit based on non-discriminatory standards. There should also be targeted community investments for social and economic stabilization.

There should be no overt monetary set-asides. It would be extremely divisive and illogical. The resentment it would ignite would be counterproductive. Yet it is right that the sins of the past continue to haunt us all.

As New Yorkers wake up to breaking news about administration scandals, they are not acutely focused on reparations right now. Instead, they hear the rumblings of a tidal wave of new forced resignations from leadership cronies who all have suddenly discovered they want more time for family and self-care. They are told that the city's non-human rat population has reached three million (show me the analytics!) and restaurant inspections have plummeted.

With City Hall in damage-control mode, is there enough time of day remaining for it to finally give police sergeants a contract, so they don't continue to get paid less than the officers they supervise?

Years ago, for a little while, teachers at top pay were making more than assistant principals and the administrators raised hell over that. To me it made sense. First, because assistant principals with only a few years teaching experience were being appointed at a time that it took many more years to reach the top step as a teacher. Second, and more importantly and irrefutably, teaching is, in my opinion, a far more demanding and complex job, and teachers are held to a higher standard of accountability than are assistant principals.

But the plight of the sergeants is different.

At some point, negotiations will be wrapped up and there will be handshakes until the next cycle. But a handshake for historical sins will not suffice. Reparations is not repair.