There certainly were a lot of lingering images from Baltimore last week.
There were, of course, the images of the plundering of small businesses, the burning of public property, the clashes between protestors and police. Those images overwhelmed everything else.
There were also the images of a city government that was caught flat–footed in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death while in police custody. One had to wonder if this was an isolated incident, or if this sort of thing, albeit on a much smaller scale, goes on all the time. Could the government of Baltimore really be that inept, that incompetent?
And there was the image of the Baltimore mom slapping her son around. I think there must have been a lot of people who applauded that assertion of parental authority. There seems to be far too little of it these days.
I felt some of the most powerful images from Baltimore were the less public moments, the ones that photojournalists always seem to find. Sometimes, unfortunately, those moments have been manufactured, but the spontaneous ones have the power to remain in your memory.
Like the one at the top of this post of the black child distributing bottles of water to city police in riot gear.
It reminded me of a mental image I've carried with me for many years — I say mental because it is entirely the product of my imagination based on accounts I have read and heard. As far as I know, there is no photograph of it. But it is said to have happened 45 years ago — yesterday, I believe, maybe the day before — in Ohio.
To put it in historical perspective, President Nixon had just told the world about the Americans' previously secret invasion of Cambodia. Angry protests had erupted on college campuses all across the country. In Ohio, the National Guard had been called out to bring order to the campus of Kent State University.
Lots of people think that the Guard only appeared in Kent on the day of the shootings — Monday, May 4, 1970 — but the Guard was there that weekend. Sometime that weekend, Allison Krause, who had just turned 19, approached one of the Guardsmen with a flower in her hand. She placed it in the barrel of his weapon and said, "Flowers are better than bullets."
On Monday, May 4, Krause was one of four Kent State students who died after being shot by Guardsmen. Her comment about flowers and bullets is chiseled into the stone that marks her grave.
It seems to me that those two moments, separated by nearly half a century, summarize the differences in the thinking of the two sides in our ongoing political debates.
Liberals are like the image in my mind of Allison Krause. They see an ideal world that doesn't exist — but, in their minds, it should, and it frustrates them that it does not.
Conservatives are like the young black boy distributing water bottles to combatants. They see the world — and deal with it — as it is. They wish the world was better, but it is not, and it frustrates them that it is not.
I wonder if the two sides will ever find common ground.
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