By Aryeh Pekker
Earlier this month on October 11, 2009 there was a march in Washington D.C. regarding gay rights. It was a march where thousands of people, gay and straight, walked together in our nation’s capital holding signs and colored flags in a demonstration for equal rights. Many today argue that gay people already have their equal rights and that all that this march and others do is display an image of arrogance by people who want to defile the meaning of marriage and corrupt the spirit of our armed forces. If I may ask, is that really a valid argument? I have always seen marriage as a statement of love and spiritual cohesion. When someone announces that they are getting married we take it as a statement that they are making a commitment of love to one another. However, when two men or two women ask for that same chance to pledge their love to one another, all of a sudden we hear statements like “it’s not natural” or “they can’t procreate so they don’t have a right to marry.” Is that what the meaning of marriage is today? Is it all about what people can do physically and not what they can share emotionally? If there was ever a perversion of the meaning of marriage I believe those statements would be it. Is it not natural for two people to express their love for one another? The obvious implication is of course that homosexuality is not natural. Aside from the fact that homosexual sex has always been a part of human history, scientists have already shown us that it is even natural in the animal kingdom. It is not uncommon for dolphins, monkeys and even sea lions to engage in homosexual sex. It is understandable that it may not appeal to everyone. I myself am not gay and admit that even the thought of gay sex will sometimes make me cringe, although I must apologize that I usually don’t apply the same standard when it involves two women but that is different story, but in either case what right does that give me to deny someone their right to make a statement of love for someone else? As for the issue of procreation, it is perfectly legal for a sterile man and a sterile woman to marry, so what is the difference? Now on to the question of gays in the military. How is a person’s sexual orientation at all relevant to their ability to serve their country? Again the premise for this argument is completely superficial. The military is something we see as “macho” and generally “manly”, but if the person is gay we automatically disregard the fact that they are willing to risk their lives for their country and instead focus simply on the fact that they are gay. There was a time in this country where it wasn’t “natural” or right to let a black person marry a white one or for black people to hold any position above a cook in the military. Do we want to go down that path again? Is it not time we stop limiting rights to people simply on the basis of them being who they are? We have so much to share with each other and yet we always look for petty reasons to divide ourselves. It is time we started accepting each other for who we are or we’ll just keep hating one another for reasons we really don’t understand.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Can poverty be ever ended?
By: Jing Ding
Dr. King’s “letter from
Marxist believe that in order to overcome the fetters of private property the working class must seize political power internationally through a social revolution and expropriate the capitalist classes around the world and place the productive capacities of society into collective ownership. Upon this material foundation classes would be abolished and the material basis for all forms of inequality between humankind would dissolve.
People's intellectual level is different since they were born. Also their family background and political situation is different when they were born. All those factors will define how successful a person can be in the future. It is impossible for everyone to be same successful. There are always some small numbers of people can be leaders, can run successful businesses and most of the others can be followers and the rest of them can’t even follow. Those who can’t follows are those who end up in poverty. Social welfare can't get them out there. Charities can't get them out there. Those efforts only kept them alive and gave peace to the society.
Is there anything we can do to get those people out of poverty? My opinion is that we have already done what we can, they have to pull themselves out by themselves! Because most of them will never try to pull themselves out due to many reasons. So poverty can't never be ended.
"Barbies Fiftieth Anniversary-congratulations?"
By: Ariel Eliach
As girls and boys we are all brought up to believe that Barbie has the best most “perfect” body and life. She is 7 feet tall with irregularly long legs platinum blonde hair blue eyes, very large chest, a tiny waist ,a flat stomach and not an inch of fat on her entire body. She has a dreamy boyfriend/husband (whatever your imagination chooses) Ken. They have dream houses and amazing get away vacation spots.
“Its time for bed” my mother says. I quickly wrap up my Barbie dolls and put them to bed. Before I brush my teeth I take a quick glance in the mirror. I think to myself, I do not have blond hair nor do I have long legs I have a pop belly and some chub on my thighs. I do not have a boy friend and I do not have the money to go on vacations. As a seven-year-old girl one is faced with questions and identity issues that no one especially a seven-year-old child should have to go through.
Why is it that as girls we are faced with body image insecurities at such a young age? I went to a Barbie website and this is what popped up “It’s Barbie’s world we just play in it” Exactly, we will never live it, because it is fake and unobtainable. From the young age of 5,6,7 girls are taught to believe that life is just like Barbie’s life. What young children can see is Barbie, and her appearance. They are not paying attention to the fact that she may have a career. Barbie’s life is about looks and “beauty”. It is giving these children the message that they should grow up and be exactly like her. Which is than translated in their minds as “look” exactly like her”. Barbie herself is plastic and fake; her essence is merely giving children a negative message. Whether it is telling young girls to look exactly like Barbie or young boys that all girls look like Barbie, the message is negative in both. She isn’t real! She is made out of manufactures that just wanted to make some money. Do they have any idea of there impact on young children all over the world? If it is Barbie’s 50th anniversary why hasn’t she aged a day in her life? The world has become so caught up in having the “perfect” everything they have forgotten that humans are imperfect and that the beauty lies with in those “imperfections”. They forgot to tell these seven-year-old girls, to sit back, relax and enjoy the beauty of their youth. One does not need to look like Barbie just to be beautiful. One can try and teach a child that, but if the child has already been taught to have one image of beauty it is pretty hard to undo.
I am not saying that Barbie is the only reason for the high rate of eating disorders in America. But, she definitely doesn’t help it. While the media presents beautiful women as needing to be a specific shape, size and/or color, 5,6,7 year old girls are not reading seventeen magazine (or I at least hope not) But, they are playing with dolls, friends and dress up. The dolls just happen to be “beautiful” “perfect” unrealistic Barbie’s. If as a child that is all one is shown. How does one expect them not to think that there is only one way to be beautiful? If all Barbie’s look the same than how can we as humans who come in different shape, sizes and color ever be “pretty”?
We have to start teaching our children from a very young age that there is not one idea and way to be beautiful. Beauty comes from with in. There is not one way to neither define it nor live it. Now how are we supposed to do that while they are playing with a one very specific perfect, beautiful, fake Barbie doll?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Worst World Series Ever
The only match-up the Met fan dreads for, is this: A Yankees- Phillies World Series. The World Series is a matchup of the best of the best in baseball. But not for Mets fans.
In 1997 Major League Baseball scheduled interleague games between the National League and the American League. From that day forward the rivalry of
The Yankees are a
But why wouldn’t Mets fan be jealous? The Yankees fans have had twenty-six times to celebrate while the Mets fan only two. The Yankees have had the highest paid players year after year and perform up to their standards. While the Mets only thought they were getting the best players and played like the injury prone head cases they actually were.
“The Mets are choke-artists” The famous quote by the Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels that has fueled the Mets-Phillies rival. The Phillies fans some of the cockiest fans in baseball, but why shouldn’t they be? They are the most current World Series Champions, and have reached the Championship for the second year in a row. The Phillies fan makes sure to always stick it to the Mets fan. From stealing the Mets famous rally cry “You Gotta Believe” coined by Mets pitcher Tug McGraw, who also pitched for the Phillies, to Jimmy Rollins boasting that “We are the team to beat” every year. The Phillies have homegrown talent that is solely responsible for their success in the past few years, something the Met fan only wishes for.
This season for the Met fan was something to rip up and put into the fire. Wait for next year, again. It was pathetic, from spring training lineups during the regular season, to a brand new $800 million ballpark looking like it was the home of the Dodgers. No one thought it could have been worse, until now.
Mets fans cannot root for the cross-town rival Yankees because we hate them; we despise everything that they are. I personally have never set foot in Yankee stadium nor do I plan on it any time soon. The Phillies are our division rivals who gloat at our demise. How can the Met fan root for any team? We simply cannot.
I will tell you that I will watch the World Series not because I am rooting for either team but because I only picture the Mets being there one day, something that is sad but true. This will be the worst week ever for a Mets fan.
By: Michael Franklin
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Demise of the Vampire
By Ezra Frager
Vampires have become a part of today’s pop culture. They are all the rage right now. It is all that teenage girls can talk about. However the vampire of today is not the same as the vampires portrayed in stories and movies of the past few centuries. The depiction of the classic vampire well known by all has been defiled and replaced with a new less frightening version.
Last year I spent a year studying abroad in Israel. Being in a foreign country with limited computer access and television I was essentially disconnected from the happenings of the world. I would get snippets of news here and there, and heard about a new vampire movie that was out called Twilight, and doing very well in the box office. With no previous knowledge about the book and as a big vampire movie fanatic I went to go see the movie thinking it would be scary, entertaining, gory, and action packed such as the Blade or Underworld films. Of course what I saw was nothing of the sort. I was appalled. Vampires have gone from being villainous, murderess monsters to attractive young heroic men involved in a tacky love story.
The Twilight books written by Stephenie Meyer and movie have exploded in popularity. The novel was the biggest selling book of 2008 and to date, has sold 17 million copies around the globe, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and been translated into 37 different languages ( “The Top 100 titles of 2008” USA Today, Gerri Miller “Inside Twilight”, Kenneth Turan “Movie Review”). The movie grossed more than $382,000,000 worldwide and an additional $157,000,000 from DVD sales (Box Office Mojo, The Numbers). This pandemic for the most part has infected girls spanning from young to even middle aged. The popularity of twilight has led to the spawning of new shows such as The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and a variety of new vampire books, all of which share a similar plotline to Twilight involving a romantic relationship between a vampire and a woman. I even came across a Special Edition “People” magazine devoted to giving only exclusive coverage from the set of the next Twilight movie New Moon. In it were at least five advertisements for a different series of vampire novels.
The classical image of the vampire that has been around for millennium has been butchered by Twilight and its offspring. Every culture from the times of even Mesopotamia 9000 years ago has legends involving vampires and vampire like creatures. Most of these legends and folklore give the impression of vampires being blood thirsty monsters who feed on humans in order to survive. Today’s new version of the vampire has them restraining themselves from feeding on the blood of humans and feeding solely on animals. Any vampire that doesn’t do this is an enemy of the ones that do. According to most vampire folklore vampires cannot be out in the day light or they shall be incinerated. In Twilight when a vampire goes out into the sun all that happens is his skin sparkles as if covered in glitter. In The Vampire Diaries as long as a vampire is wearing a special wring he can also be out in the sun. Two well known characteristics of the classic vampire according to most legends and portrayed in numerous vampire movies, shows, and books over the past two centuries is the ability of garlic and crosses to repel them. This was also ignored in the creation of this new generation. Vampires are supposed to instill fear in movie and television viewers. I have actually seen interviews with young women on the news who instead of being frightened by today’s vampire movies, books, etc. actually fantasize about being in a romantic relationship with a vampire and becoming one so they can live together for eternity. This is not the effect a vampire should have on people. Why would any sane person want a creature to sink their enormous fangs into their neck, suck all of their blood, and doom them to walk the face of the earth forever as they watch friends and family all die away? Why would anybody want to no longer be able to take pleasure in the taste of fine food and constantly crave blood; the only way of being put to rest through a gruesome murder whether it be the impaling of their heart with a wooden stake, decapitation, burned alive, etc.?
We are currently in the dawn of a new age of vampire. No longer are vampires frightening monsters, who are the subject of horror films. Today vampires can be found in dull romantic movies, books, and television shows that glorifies being a vampire and ignores ancient folklore. This is not the way vampires are supposed to be. The real “undead” are finally dead.
Vampires have become a part of today’s pop culture. They are all the rage right now. It is all that teenage girls can talk about. However the vampire of today is not the same as the vampires portrayed in stories and movies of the past few centuries. The depiction of the classic vampire well known by all has been defiled and replaced with a new less frightening version.
Last year I spent a year studying abroad in Israel. Being in a foreign country with limited computer access and television I was essentially disconnected from the happenings of the world. I would get snippets of news here and there, and heard about a new vampire movie that was out called Twilight, and doing very well in the box office. With no previous knowledge about the book and as a big vampire movie fanatic I went to go see the movie thinking it would be scary, entertaining, gory, and action packed such as the Blade or Underworld films. Of course what I saw was nothing of the sort. I was appalled. Vampires have gone from being villainous, murderess monsters to attractive young heroic men involved in a tacky love story.
The Twilight books written by Stephenie Meyer and movie have exploded in popularity. The novel was the biggest selling book of 2008 and to date, has sold 17 million copies around the globe, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and been translated into 37 different languages ( “The Top 100 titles of 2008” USA Today, Gerri Miller “Inside Twilight”, Kenneth Turan “Movie Review”). The movie grossed more than $382,000,000 worldwide and an additional $157,000,000 from DVD sales (Box Office Mojo, The Numbers). This pandemic for the most part has infected girls spanning from young to even middle aged. The popularity of twilight has led to the spawning of new shows such as The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and a variety of new vampire books, all of which share a similar plotline to Twilight involving a romantic relationship between a vampire and a woman. I even came across a Special Edition “People” magazine devoted to giving only exclusive coverage from the set of the next Twilight movie New Moon. In it were at least five advertisements for a different series of vampire novels.
The classical image of the vampire that has been around for millennium has been butchered by Twilight and its offspring. Every culture from the times of even Mesopotamia 9000 years ago has legends involving vampires and vampire like creatures. Most of these legends and folklore give the impression of vampires being blood thirsty monsters who feed on humans in order to survive. Today’s new version of the vampire has them restraining themselves from feeding on the blood of humans and feeding solely on animals. Any vampire that doesn’t do this is an enemy of the ones that do. According to most vampire folklore vampires cannot be out in the day light or they shall be incinerated. In Twilight when a vampire goes out into the sun all that happens is his skin sparkles as if covered in glitter. In The Vampire Diaries as long as a vampire is wearing a special wring he can also be out in the sun. Two well known characteristics of the classic vampire according to most legends and portrayed in numerous vampire movies, shows, and books over the past two centuries is the ability of garlic and crosses to repel them. This was also ignored in the creation of this new generation. Vampires are supposed to instill fear in movie and television viewers. I have actually seen interviews with young women on the news who instead of being frightened by today’s vampire movies, books, etc. actually fantasize about being in a romantic relationship with a vampire and becoming one so they can live together for eternity. This is not the effect a vampire should have on people. Why would any sane person want a creature to sink their enormous fangs into their neck, suck all of their blood, and doom them to walk the face of the earth forever as they watch friends and family all die away? Why would anybody want to no longer be able to take pleasure in the taste of fine food and constantly crave blood; the only way of being put to rest through a gruesome murder whether it be the impaling of their heart with a wooden stake, decapitation, burned alive, etc.?
We are currently in the dawn of a new age of vampire. No longer are vampires frightening monsters, who are the subject of horror films. Today vampires can be found in dull romantic movies, books, and television shows that glorifies being a vampire and ignores ancient folklore. This is not the way vampires are supposed to be. The real “undead” are finally dead.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Paper Three Assignment, fall 2009
Following King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a rough model, our third assignment is to write a letter which advances a focused and developed argument about a specific topic to a particular individual or group. You are free to write about any topic of your choosing: I encourage you to write about something that interests you (for example, an argument about a current national or local political debate) or that engages your academic and professional interests. Please pay attention to things like audience, tone, paragraph organization, evidence, and counter-arguments. Length: 3 – 5 pages. Check syllabus for rough draft (three copies) and final draft (one copy) due dates. (Some possible topics include, but are by no means limited to: CUNY budget cuts, health care reform, immigration, advertising and gender roles, etc.)
Thursday, October 8, 2009
In addition to the essay by Brent Staples (available in the Seagull Reader), please make sure you have read the following essay, by Bruce Shapiro, for class on October 13th. Please print it off (you might want to copy and paste it into a word document) and bring it with you to class. Thanks, and enjoy your weekend.
Selected Feature
One Violent Crime
By Bruce Shapiro
New Haven, Connecticut
Alone in my home I am staring at the television screen and
shouting. On the evening local news I have unexpectedly encountered
video footage, several months old, of myself writhing on an
ambulance gurney, bright green shirt open and drenched with blood,
skin pale, knee raised, trying desperately and with utter futility
to find relief from pain.
On the evening of August 7, 1994, I was among seven people stabbed
and seriously wounded in a coffee bar a few blocks from my house.
Any televised recollection of this incident would be upsetting. But
the anger that has me shouting tonight is quite specific, and
political, in origin: My picture is being shown on the news to
illustrate why Connecticut's legislature plans to lock up more
criminals for a longer time. A picture of my body, contorted and
bleeding, has become a propaganda image in the crime war.
I had not planned to write about this assault. But for months now
the politics of the nation have in large part been the politics of
crime, from last year's federal crime bill through the fall
elections through the Contract With America proposals currently
awaiting action by the Senate. Among a welter of reactions to the
attack, one feeling is clear: I am unwilling to be a silent poster
child in this debate.
The physical and political truth about violence and crime lie in
their specificity, so here is what happened: I had gone out for
after-dinner coffee that evening with two friends and New Haven
neighbors, Martin and Anna Broell Bresnick. At 9:45 we arrived at a
recently opened coffeehouse on Audubon Street, a block occupied by
an arts high school where Anna teaches, other community arts
institutions, a few pleasant shops and upscale condos. Entering, we
said hello to another friend, a former student of Anna's named
Cristina Koning, who the day before had started working behind the
counter. We sat at a small table near the front of the cafe; about
fifteen people were scattered around the room. Just before 10, the
owner announced closing time. Martin stood up and walked a few
yards to the counter for a final refill.
Suddenly there was chaos -- as if a mortar shell had landed. I
looked up, heard Martin call Anna's name, saw his arm raised and a
flash of metal and people leaping away from a thin bearded man with
a ponytail. Tables and chairs toppled. Without thinking I shouted
to Anna, "Get down!" and pulled her to the floor, between our table
and the cafe's outer wall. She clung to my shirt, I to her
shoulders, and, crouching, we pulled each other toward the door.
What actually happened I was only able to tentatively reconstruct
many weeks later. Apparently, as Martin headed toward the counter
the thin bearded man, whose name we later learned was Daniel Silva,
asked the time from a young man named Richard Colberg, who was on
his way toward the door. Colberg answered and turned to leave.
Without any warning, Silva pulled out a hunting knife with a
six-inch blade and stabbed in the lower back a woman leaving with
Colberg, a medical technician named Kerstin Braig. Then he stabbed
Colberg, severing an artery in his thigh. Silva was a slight man
but he moved with demonic speed and force around the cafe's
counter. He struck Martin in the thigh and in the arm he raised to
protect his face. Our friend Cris Koning had in a moment's time
pushed out the screen in a window and helped the wounded Kerstin
Braig through it to safety. Cris was talking on the phone with the
police when Silva lunged over the counter and stabbed her in the
chest and abdomen. He stabbed Anna in the side as she and I pulled
each other along the wall. He stabbed Emily Bernard, a graduate
student who had been sitting quietly reading a book, in the abdomen
as she tried to flee through the cafe's back door. All of this
happened in about the time it has taken you to read this paragraph.
Meanwhile, I had made it out the cafe's front door onto the brick
sidewalk with Anna, neither of us realizing yet that she was
wounded. Seeing Martin through the window, I returned inside and we
came out together. Somehow we separated, fleeing opposite ways down
the street. I had gone no more than a few steps when I felt a hard
punch in my back followed instantly by the unforgettable sensation
of skin and muscle tissue parting. Silva had stabbed me about six
inches above my waist, just beneath my rib cage. (That single deep
stroke cut my diaphragm and sliced my spleen in half.) Without
thinking, I clapped my left hand over the wound even before the
knife was out and its blade caught my hand, leaving a slice across
my palm and two fingers.
"Why are you doing this?" I cried out to Silva in the moment after
feeling his knife punch in and yank out. As I fell to the street he
leaned over my face; I vividly remember the knife's immense and
glittering blade. He directed the point through my shirt into the
flesh of my chest, beneath my left shoulder. I remember his brown
beard, his clear blue-gray eyes looking directly into mine, the
round globe of a street lamp like a halo above his head. Although I
was just a few feet from a cafe full of people and although Martin
and Anna were only yards away, the street, the city, the world felt
utterly empty except for me and this thin bearded stranger with
clear eyes and a bowie knife. The space around us -- well-lit,
familiar Audubon Street, where for six years I had taken a child to
music lessons -- seemed literally to have expanded into a vast and
dark canyon.
"You killed my mother," he answered. My own desperate response:
"Please don't." Silva pulled the knifepoint out of my chest and
disappeared. A moment later I saw him flying down the street on a
battered, ungainly bicycle, back straight, vest flapping and
ponytail flying.
After my assailant had gone I lay on the sidewalk, hand still over
the wound on my back, screaming. Pain ran over me like an express
train; it felt as though every muscle in my back was locked and
contorted; breathing was excruciating. A security guard appeared
across the street from me; I called out to him but he stood there
frozen, or so it seemed. (A few minutes later, he would help police
chase Silva down.) I shouted to Anna, who was hiding behind a car
down the street. Still in shock and unaware of her own injury, she
ran for help, eventually collapsing on the stairs of a nearby
brownstone where a prayer group that was meeting upstairs answered
her desperate ringing of the doorbell. From where I was lying, I
saw a second-floor light in the condo complex across the way. A
woman's head appeared in the window. "Please help me," I implored.
"He's gone. Please help me." She shouted back that she had called
the police, but she did not come to the street. I was suddenly
aware of a blond woman -- Kerstin Braig, though I did not know her
name then -- in a white-and-gray plaid dress, sitting on the curb.
I asked her for help. "I'm sorry, I've done all I can," she
muttered. She raised her hand, like a medieval icon; it was covered
with blood. So was her dress. She sank into a kind of stupor. Up
the street I saw a police car's flashing blue lights, then
another's, then I saw an officer with a concerned face and a
crackling radio crouched beside me. I stayed conscious as the
medics arrived and I was loaded into an ambulance -- being filmed
for television, as it turns out, though I have no memory of the
crew's presence.
Being a victim is a hard idea to accept, even while lying in a
hospital bed with tubes in veins, chest, penis and abdomen. The
spirit rebels against the idea of oneself as fundamentally
powerless. So I didn't think much for the first few days about the
meaning of being a victim; I saw no political dimension to my
experience.
As I learned in more detail what had happened I thought, in my
jumbled-up, anesthetized state, about my injured friends --
although everyone survived, their wounds ranged from quite serious
to critical -- and about my wounds and surgery. I also thought
about my assailant. A few facts about him are worth repeating.
Until August 7 Daniel Silva was a self-employed junk dealer and a
homeowner. He was white. He lived with his mother and several dogs.
He had no arrest record. A New Haven police detective who was
hospitalized across the hall from me recalled Silva as a socially
marginal neighborhood character. He was not, apparently, a drug
user. He had told neighbors about much violence in his family --
indeed not long before August 7 he showed one neighbor a scar on
his thigh he said was from a stab wound.
A week earlier, Silva's 79-year-old mother had been hospitalized
for diabetes. After a few days the hospital moved her to a new
room; when Silva saw his mother's empty bed he panicked, but nurses
swiftly took him to her new location. Still, something seemed to
have snapped. Earlier on the day of the stabbings, police say,
Silva released his beloved dogs, set fire to his house, and rode
away on his bicycle as it burned. He arrived on Audubon Street with
a single dog on a leash, evidently convinced his mother was dead.
(She actually did die a few weeks after Silva was jailed.)
While I lay in the hospital, the big story on CNN was the federal
crime bill then being debated in Congress. Even fogged by morphine
I was aware of the irony. I was flat on my back, the result of a
particularly violent assault, while Congress eventually passed the
anti-crime package I had editorialized against in The Nation just a
few weeks earlier. Night after night in the hospital, unable to
sleep, I watched the crime bill debate replayed and heard
Republicans and Democrats (who had sponsored the bill in the first
place) fall over each other to prove who could be the toughest on
crime.
The bill passed on August 21, a few days after I returned home. In
early autumn I actually read the entire text of the crime bill --
all 412 pages. What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the
circumstances compelling: Not a single one of those 412 pages would
have protected me or Anna or Martin or any of the others from our
assailant. Not the enhanced prison terms, not the forty-four new
death penalty offenses, not the three-strikes-you're-out
requirements, not the summary deportations of criminal aliens. And
the new tougher-than-tough anti-crime provisions of the Contract
With America, like the proposed abolition of the Fourth Amendment's
search and seizure protections, offer no more practical protection.
On the other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety net
shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might
have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant --
and thus in the life of someone like me. My assailant's growing
distress in the days before August 7 was obvious to his neighbors.
He had muttered darkly about relatives planning to burn down his
house. A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net might just
have saved me and six others from untold pain and trouble.
From my perspective -- the perspective of a crime victim -- the
Contract With America and its conservative Democratic analogs are
really blueprints for making the streets even less safe. Want to
take away that socialistic income subsidy called welfare? Fine.
Connecticut Governor John Rowland proposes cutting off all benefits
after eighteen months. So more people in New Haven and other cities
will turn to the violence-breeding economy of crack, or emotionally
implode from sheer desperation. Cut funding for those soft-headed
social workers? Fine; let more children be beaten without the
prospect of outside intervention, more Daniel Silvas carrying their
own traumatic scars into violent adulthood. Get rid of the few
amenities prisoners enjoy, like sports equipment, musical
instruments and the right to get college degrees, as proposed by
the Congressional right? Fine; we'll make sure that those inmates
are released to their own neighborhoods tormented with unchanneled
rage.
One thing I could not properly appreciate in the hospital was how
deeply many friends, neighbors and acquaintances were shaken by the
coffeehouse stabbings, let alone strangers who took the time to
write. The reaction of most was a combination of decent horrified
empathy and a clear sense that their own presumption of safety was
undermined.
But some people who didn't bother to aquaint themselves with the
facts used the stabbings as a sort of Rorschach test on which they
projected their own preconceptions about crime, violence and New
Haven. Some present and former Yale students, for instance, were
desperate to see in my stabbing evidence of the great dangers of
New Haven's inner city. One student newspaper wrote about "New
Haven's image as a dangerous town fraught with violence." A student
reporter from another Yale paper asked if I didn't think the attack
proved New Haven needs better police protection. Given the random
nature of this assault -- it could as easily have happened in
wealthy, suburban Greenwich, where a friend of mine was held up at
an ATM at the point of an assault rifle -- it's tempting to dismiss
such sentiments as typical products of an insular urban campus. But
city-hating is central to today's political culture. Newt Gingrich
excoriates cities as hopelessly pestilential, crime-ridden and
corrupt. Fear of urban crime and of the dark-skinned people who
live in cities is the right's basic text, and defunding cities a
central agenda item for the new Congressional majority.
Yet in no small measure it was the institutions of an urban
community that saved my life last August 7. That concerned police
officer who found me and Kerstin Braig on the street was joined in
a moment by enough emergency workers to handle the carnage in and
around the coffeehouse, and his backups arrived quickly enough to
chase down my assailant three blocks away. In minutes I was taken
to Yale-New Haven hospital less than a mile away -- built in part
with the kind of public funding so hated by the right. As I was
wheeled into the E.R., several dozen doctors and nurses descended
to handle all the wounded.
By then my abdomen had swelled from internal bleeding. Dr. Gerard
Burns, a trauma surgeon, told me a few weeks later that I arrived
on his operating table white as a ghost; my prospects, he said,
would have been poor had I not been delivered so quickly, and to an
E.R. with the kind of trauma team available only at a large
metropolitan hospital. In other words, if my stabbing had taken
place in the suburbs I would have bled to death.
Why didn't anyone try to stop him?" That question was even more
common than the reflexive city-bashing. I can't even begin to guess
the number of times I had to answer it. Each time, I repeated that
Silva moved too fast, that it was simply too confusing. And each
time, I found the question not just foolish but offensive.
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" To understand that question is to
understand, in some measure, why crime is such a potent political
issue. To begin with, the question carries not empathy but an
implicit burden of blame; it really asks "Why didn't you stop him?"
It is asked because no one likes to imagine oneself a victim. It's
far easier to graft onto oneself the aggressive power of the
attacker, to embrace the delusion of oneself as Arnold
Schwarzenegger defeating a multitude single-handedly. If I am tough
enough and strong enough I can take out the bad guys.
The country is at present suffering from a huge version of this
same delusion. This myth is buried deep in the political culture,
nurtured in the historical tales of frontier violence and
vigilantism and by the action-hero fantasies of film and
television. Now, bolstered by the social Darwinists of the right,
who see society as an unfettered marketplace in which the strongest
individuals flourish, this delusion frames the crime debate.
I also felt that the question "Why didn't anybody stop him?"
implied only two choices: Rambo-like heroism or abject victimhood.
To put it another way, it suggests that the only possible responses
to danger are the individual biological imperatives of fight or
flight. And people don't want to think of themselves as on the side
of flight. This is a notion whose political moment has arrived. In
last year's debate over the crime bill, conservatives successfully
portrayed themselves as those who would stand and fight; liberals
were portrayed as ineffectual cowards.
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" That question and its underlying
implications see both heroes and victims as lone individuals. But
on the receiving end of a violent attack, the fight-or-flight
dichotomy didn't apply. Nor did that radically individualized
notion of survival. At the coffeehouse that night, at the moments
of greatest threat, there were no Schwarzeneggers, no stand-alone
heroes. (In fact I doubt anyone could have "taken out" Silva; as
with most crimes, his attack came too suddenly.) But neither were
there abject victims. Instead, in the confusion and panic of
life-threatening attack, people reached out to one another. This
sounds simple; yet it suggests there is an instinct for mutual aid
that poses a profound challenge to the atomized individualism of
the right. Cristina Koning helped the wounded Kerstin Braig to
escape, and Kerstin in turn tried to bring Cristina along. Anna and
I, and then Martin and I, clung to each other, pulling one another
toward the door. And just as Kerstin found me on the sidewalk
rather than wait for help alone, so Richard and Emily, who had
never met before, together sought a hiding place around the corner.
Three of us even spoke with Silva either the moment before or the
instant after being stabbed. My plea to Silva may or may not have
been what kept him from pushing his knife all the way through my
chest and into my heart; it's impossible to know what was going
through his mind. But this impulse to communicate, to establish
human contact across a gulf of terror and insanity, is deeper and
more subtle than the simple formulation of fight or flight, courage
or cowardice, would allow.
I have never been in a war, but I now think I understand a little
the intense bond among war veterans who have survived awful
carnage. It is not simply the common fact of survival but the way
in which the presence of these others seemed to make survival
itself possible. There's evidence, too, that those who try to go it
alone suffer more. In her insightful study Trauma and Recovery,
Judith Herman, a psychiatrist, writes about rape victims, Vietnam
War veterans, political prisoners and other survivors of extreme
violence. "The capacity to preserve social connection. . ." she
concludes, "even in the face of extremity, seems to protect people
to some degree against the later development of post-traumatic
syndromes. For example, among survivors of a disaster at sea, the
men who had managed to escape by cooperating with others showed
relatively little evidence of post-traumatic stress afterward." On
the other hand, she reports that the "highly symptomatic" ones
among those survivors were "'Rambos,' men who had plunged into
impulsive, isolated action and not affiliated with others."
The political point here is that the Rambo justice system proposed
by the right is rooted in that dangerous myth of the individual
fighting against a hostile world. Recently that myth got another
boost from several Republican-controlled state legislatures, which
have made it much easier to carry concealed handguns. But the myth
has nothing to do with the reality of violent crime, the ways to
prevent it or the needs of survivors. Had Silva been carrying a
handgun instead of a knife on August 7, there would have been a
massacre.
I do understand the rage and frustration behind the crime-victim
movement, and I can see how the right has harnessed it. For weeks I
thought obsessively and angrily of those minutes on Audubon Street,
when first the nameless woman in the window and then the security
guard refused to approach me -- as if I, wounded and helpless, were
the dangerous one. There was also a subtle shift in my
consciousness a few days after the stabbing. Up until that point,
the legal process and press attention seemed clearly centered on my
injuries and experience, and those of my fellow victims. But once
Silva was arraigned and the formal process of prosecution began, it
became his case, not mine. I experienced an overnight sense of
marginalization, a feeling of helplessness bordering on
irrelevance.
Sometimes that got channeled into outrage, fear and panic. After
arraignment, Silva's bail was set at $700,000. That sounds high,
but just 10 percent of that amount in cash, perhaps obtained
through some relative with home equity, would have bought his
pretrial release. I was frantic at even this remote prospect of
Silva walking the streets. So were the six other victims and our
families. We called the prosecutor virtually hourly to request
higher bail. It was eventually raised to $800,000, partly because
of our complaints and partly because an arson charge was added.
Silva remains in the Hartford Community Correctional Center
awaiting trial.
Near the six-month anniversary of the stabbings I called the
prosecutor and learned that in December Silva's lawyer filed papers
indicating he intends to claim a "mental disease or defect"
defense. If successful it would send him to a maximum-security
hospital for the criminally insane for the equivalent of the
maximum criminal penalty. In February the court was still awaiting
a report from Silva's psychiatrist. Then the prosecution will have
him examined by its own psychiatrist. "There's a backlog," I was
told; the case is not likely to come to trial until the end of 1995
at the earliest. Intellectually, I understand that Silva is
securely behind bars, that the court system is overburdened, that
the delay makes no difference in the long-term outcome. But
emotionally, viscerally, the delay is devastating.
Another of my bursts of victim-consciousness involved the press.
Objectively, I know that many people who took the trouble to
express their sympathy to me found out only through news stories.
And sensitive reporting can for the crime victim be a kind of
ratification of the seriousness of an assault, a reflection of the
community's concern. One reporter for the daily New Haven Register,
Josh Kovner, did produce level-headed and insightful stories about
the Audubon Street attack. But most other reporting was
exploitative, intrusive and inaccurate. I was only a few hours out
of surgery, barely able to speak, when the calls from television
stations and papers started coming to my hospital room. Anna and
Martin, sent home to recover, were ambushed by a Hartford TV crew
as they emerged from their physician's office, and later rousted
from their beds by reporters from another TV station ringing their
doorbell. The Register's editors enraged all seven victims by
printing our home addresses (a company policy, for some reason) and
running spectacularly distressing full-color photos of the crime
scene complete with the coffee bar's bloody windowsill.
Such press coverage inspired in all of us a rage it is impossible
to convey. In a study commissioned by the British Broadcasting
Standards Council, survivors of violent crimes and disasters "told
story after story of the hurt they suffered through the timing of
media attention, intrusion into their privacy and harassment,
through inaccuracy, distortion and distasteful detail in what was
reported." This suffering is not superficial. To the victim of
violent crime the press may reinforce the perception that the world
is an uncomprehending and dangerous place.
The very same flawed judgments about "news value" contribute
significantly to a public conception of crime that is as completely
divorced from the facts as a Schwarzenegger movie. One study a few
years ago found that reports on crime and justice constitute 22-28
percent of newspaper stories, "nearly three times as much attention
as the presidency or the Congress or the state of the economy." And
the most spectacular crimes -- the stabbing of seven people in an
upscale New Haven coffee bar, for instance -- are likely to be the
most "newsworthy" even though they are statistically the least
likely. "The image of crime presented in the media is thus a
reverse image of reality," writes sociologist Mark Warr in a study
commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences.
Media coverage also brings us to another crucial political moral:
The "seriousness" of crime is a matter of race and real estate.
This has been pointed out before, but it can't be said too often.
Seven people stabbed in a relatively affluent, mostly white
neighborhood near Yale University -- this was big news on a slow
news night. It went national over the A.P. wires and international
over CNN's Headline News. It was covered by The New York Times, and
words of sympathy came to New Haven from as far as Prague and
Santiago. Because a graduate student and a professor were among
those wounded, the university sent representatives to the emergency
room. The morning after, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano walked the
neighborhood to reassure merchants and office workers. For more
than a month the regional press covered every new turn in the case.
Horrendous as it was, though, no one was killed. Four weeks later,
a 15-year-old girl named Rashawnda Crenshaw was driving with two
friends about a mile from Audubon Street. As the car in which she
was a passenger turned a corner she was shot through the window and
killed. Apparently her assailants mistook her for someone else.
Rashawnda Crenshaw was black and her shooting took place in the
Hill, the New Haven neighborhood with the highest poverty rate. No
Yale officials showed up at the hospital to comfort Crenshaw's
mother or cut through red tape. The New York Times did not come
calling; there were certainly no bulletins flashed around the world
on CNN. The local news coverage lasted just long enough for
Rashawnda Crenshaw to be buried.
Anyone trying to deal with the reality of crime, as opposed to the
fantasies peddled to win elections, needs to understand the complex
suffering of those who are survivors of traumatic crimes, and the
suffering and turmoil of their families. I have impressive physical
scars: There is a broad purple line from my breastbone to the top
of my pubic bone, an X-shaped cut into my side where the chest tube
entered, a thick pink mark on my chest where the point of Silva's
knife rested on a rib. Then on my back is the unevenly curving
horizontal scar where Silva thrust the knife in and yanked it out,
leaving what looks like a crooked smile. But the disruption of my
psyche is, day in and day out, more noticeable. For weeks after
leaving the hospital I awoke nightly agitated, drenched with
perspiration. For two months I was unable to write; my brain simply
refused to concentrate. Into any moment of mental repose would rush
images from the night of August 7; or alternatively, my mind would
simply not tune in at all. My reactions are still out of balance
and disproportionate. I shut a door on my finger, not too hard, and
my body is suddenly flooded with adrenaline and I nearly faint.
Walking on the arm of my partner, Margaret, one evening I abruptly
shove her to the side of the road; I have seen a tall, lean shadow
on the block where we are headed and am alarmed out of all
proportion. I get into an argument and find myself quaking with
rage for an hour afterward, completely unable to restore calm.
Though to all appearances normal, I feel at a long arm's remove
from all the familiar sources of pleasure, comfort and anger that
shaped my daily life before August 7.
What psychologists call post-traumatic stress disorder is, among
other things, a profoundly political state in which the world has
gone wrong, in which you feel isolated from the broader community
by the inarticulable extremity of experience. I have spent a lot of
time in the past few months thinking about what the world must look
like to those who have survived repeated violent attacks, whether
children battered in their homes or prisoners beaten or tortured
behind bars; as well as those, like rape victims, whose assaults
are rarely granted public ratification.
The right owes much of its success to the anger of crime victims
and the argument that government should do more for us. This appeal
is epitomized by the rise of restitution laws -- statutes requiring
offenders to compensate their targets. On February 7 the House of
Representatives passed, by a vote of 431 to 0, the Victim
Restitution Act, a plank of the Contract With America that would
supposedly send back to jail offenders who don't make good on their
debts to their victims. In my own state, Governor Rowland recently
proposed a restitution amendment to the state Constitution.
On the surface it is hard to argue with the principle of reasonable
restitution -- particularly since it implies community recognition
of the victim's suffering. But I wonder if these laws really will
end up benefiting someone like me -- or if they are just empty,
vote-getting devices that exploit victims and could actually hurt
our chances of getting speedy, substantive justice. H. Scott
Wallace, former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Juvenile Justice, writes in Legal Times that the much-touted Victim
Restitution Act is "unlikely to put a single dollar into crime
victims' pockets, would tie up the federal courts with waves of new
damages actions, and would promote unconstitutional debtors'
prisons."
I also worry that the rhetoric of restitution confuses -- as does
so much of the imprisonment-and-execution mania dominating the
political landscape -- the goals of justice and revenge. Revenge,
after all, is just another version of the individualized,
take-out-the-bad-guys myth. Judith Herman believes indulging
fantasies of revenge actually worsens the psychic suffering of
trauma survivors: "The desire for revenge...arises out of the
victim's experience of complete helplessness," and forever ties the
victim's fate to the perpetrator's. Real recovery from the
cataclysmic isolation of trauma comes only when "the survivor comes
to understand the issues of principle that transcend her personal
grievance against the perpetrator...[a] principle of social justice
that connects the fate of others to her own." The survivors and
victims' families of the Long Island Rail Road massacre have banded
together not to urge that Colin Ferguson be executed but to work
for gun control.
What it all comes down to is this: What do survivors of violent
crime really need? What does it mean to create a safe society? Do
we need courts so overburdened by nonviolent drug offenders that
Daniel Silvas go untried for eighteen months, delays that leave
victims and suspects alike in limbo? Do we need to throw nonviolent
drug offenders into mandatory-sentence proximity with violent
sociopaths and career criminals? Do we need the illusory bravado of
a Schwarzenegger film -- or the real political courage of those
L.I.R.R. survivors?
If the use of my picture on television unexpectedly brought me face
to face with the memory of August 7, some part of the attack is
relived for me daily as I watch the gruesome, voyeuristically
reported details of the stabbing deaths of two people in
California, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was relived
even more vividly by the televised trial of Colin Ferguson. (One
night recently after watching Ferguson on the evening news I
dreamed that I was on the witness stand and Silva, like Ferguson,
was representing himself and questioning me.) Throughout the trial,
as Ferguson spoke of falling asleep and having someone else fire
his gun, I heard neither cowardly denial nor what his first lawyer
called "black rage"; I heard Daniel Silva's calm, secure voice
telling me I killed his mother. And when I hear testimony by the
survivors of that massacre -- on a train as comfortable and
familiar to them as my neighborhood coffee bar -- I feel a great
and incommunicable fellowship.
But the public obsession with these trials, I am convinced, has no
more to do with the real experience of crime victims than does the
anti-crime posturing of politicians. I do not know what made my
assailant act as he did. Nor do I think crime and violence can be
reduced to simple political categories. I do know that the answers
will not be found in social Darwinism and atomized individualism,
in racism, in dismantling cities and increasing the destitution of
the poor. To the contrary: Every fragment of my experience suggests
that the best protections from crime and the best aid to victims
are the very social institutions most derided by the right. As
crime victim and citizen what I want is the reality of a safe
community -- not a politician's fantasyland of restitution and
revenge. That is my testimony.
Copyright (c) 1995, The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved.
Electronic redistribution for nonprofit purposes is permitted,
provided this notice is attached in its entirety. Unauthorized,
for-profit redistribution is prohibited. For further information
regarding reprinting and syndication, please call The Nation at
(212) 242-8400, ext. 226 or send e-mail to Max Block at
mblock@thenation.com.
_________________________________________________________________
HOME
This Week | Subscribe | About The Nation | Alert | Forums
Audio | Archives | Search | Hot List | Marketspace | Survey
webmanager@TheNation.com
Selected Feature
One Violent Crime
By Bruce Shapiro
New Haven, Connecticut
Alone in my home I am staring at the television screen and
shouting. On the evening local news I have unexpectedly encountered
video footage, several months old, of myself writhing on an
ambulance gurney, bright green shirt open and drenched with blood,
skin pale, knee raised, trying desperately and with utter futility
to find relief from pain.
On the evening of August 7, 1994, I was among seven people stabbed
and seriously wounded in a coffee bar a few blocks from my house.
Any televised recollection of this incident would be upsetting. But
the anger that has me shouting tonight is quite specific, and
political, in origin: My picture is being shown on the news to
illustrate why Connecticut's legislature plans to lock up more
criminals for a longer time. A picture of my body, contorted and
bleeding, has become a propaganda image in the crime war.
I had not planned to write about this assault. But for months now
the politics of the nation have in large part been the politics of
crime, from last year's federal crime bill through the fall
elections through the Contract With America proposals currently
awaiting action by the Senate. Among a welter of reactions to the
attack, one feeling is clear: I am unwilling to be a silent poster
child in this debate.
The physical and political truth about violence and crime lie in
their specificity, so here is what happened: I had gone out for
after-dinner coffee that evening with two friends and New Haven
neighbors, Martin and Anna Broell Bresnick. At 9:45 we arrived at a
recently opened coffeehouse on Audubon Street, a block occupied by
an arts high school where Anna teaches, other community arts
institutions, a few pleasant shops and upscale condos. Entering, we
said hello to another friend, a former student of Anna's named
Cristina Koning, who the day before had started working behind the
counter. We sat at a small table near the front of the cafe; about
fifteen people were scattered around the room. Just before 10, the
owner announced closing time. Martin stood up and walked a few
yards to the counter for a final refill.
Suddenly there was chaos -- as if a mortar shell had landed. I
looked up, heard Martin call Anna's name, saw his arm raised and a
flash of metal and people leaping away from a thin bearded man with
a ponytail. Tables and chairs toppled. Without thinking I shouted
to Anna, "Get down!" and pulled her to the floor, between our table
and the cafe's outer wall. She clung to my shirt, I to her
shoulders, and, crouching, we pulled each other toward the door.
What actually happened I was only able to tentatively reconstruct
many weeks later. Apparently, as Martin headed toward the counter
the thin bearded man, whose name we later learned was Daniel Silva,
asked the time from a young man named Richard Colberg, who was on
his way toward the door. Colberg answered and turned to leave.
Without any warning, Silva pulled out a hunting knife with a
six-inch blade and stabbed in the lower back a woman leaving with
Colberg, a medical technician named Kerstin Braig. Then he stabbed
Colberg, severing an artery in his thigh. Silva was a slight man
but he moved with demonic speed and force around the cafe's
counter. He struck Martin in the thigh and in the arm he raised to
protect his face. Our friend Cris Koning had in a moment's time
pushed out the screen in a window and helped the wounded Kerstin
Braig through it to safety. Cris was talking on the phone with the
police when Silva lunged over the counter and stabbed her in the
chest and abdomen. He stabbed Anna in the side as she and I pulled
each other along the wall. He stabbed Emily Bernard, a graduate
student who had been sitting quietly reading a book, in the abdomen
as she tried to flee through the cafe's back door. All of this
happened in about the time it has taken you to read this paragraph.
Meanwhile, I had made it out the cafe's front door onto the brick
sidewalk with Anna, neither of us realizing yet that she was
wounded. Seeing Martin through the window, I returned inside and we
came out together. Somehow we separated, fleeing opposite ways down
the street. I had gone no more than a few steps when I felt a hard
punch in my back followed instantly by the unforgettable sensation
of skin and muscle tissue parting. Silva had stabbed me about six
inches above my waist, just beneath my rib cage. (That single deep
stroke cut my diaphragm and sliced my spleen in half.) Without
thinking, I clapped my left hand over the wound even before the
knife was out and its blade caught my hand, leaving a slice across
my palm and two fingers.
"Why are you doing this?" I cried out to Silva in the moment after
feeling his knife punch in and yank out. As I fell to the street he
leaned over my face; I vividly remember the knife's immense and
glittering blade. He directed the point through my shirt into the
flesh of my chest, beneath my left shoulder. I remember his brown
beard, his clear blue-gray eyes looking directly into mine, the
round globe of a street lamp like a halo above his head. Although I
was just a few feet from a cafe full of people and although Martin
and Anna were only yards away, the street, the city, the world felt
utterly empty except for me and this thin bearded stranger with
clear eyes and a bowie knife. The space around us -- well-lit,
familiar Audubon Street, where for six years I had taken a child to
music lessons -- seemed literally to have expanded into a vast and
dark canyon.
"You killed my mother," he answered. My own desperate response:
"Please don't." Silva pulled the knifepoint out of my chest and
disappeared. A moment later I saw him flying down the street on a
battered, ungainly bicycle, back straight, vest flapping and
ponytail flying.
After my assailant had gone I lay on the sidewalk, hand still over
the wound on my back, screaming. Pain ran over me like an express
train; it felt as though every muscle in my back was locked and
contorted; breathing was excruciating. A security guard appeared
across the street from me; I called out to him but he stood there
frozen, or so it seemed. (A few minutes later, he would help police
chase Silva down.) I shouted to Anna, who was hiding behind a car
down the street. Still in shock and unaware of her own injury, she
ran for help, eventually collapsing on the stairs of a nearby
brownstone where a prayer group that was meeting upstairs answered
her desperate ringing of the doorbell. From where I was lying, I
saw a second-floor light in the condo complex across the way. A
woman's head appeared in the window. "Please help me," I implored.
"He's gone. Please help me." She shouted back that she had called
the police, but she did not come to the street. I was suddenly
aware of a blond woman -- Kerstin Braig, though I did not know her
name then -- in a white-and-gray plaid dress, sitting on the curb.
I asked her for help. "I'm sorry, I've done all I can," she
muttered. She raised her hand, like a medieval icon; it was covered
with blood. So was her dress. She sank into a kind of stupor. Up
the street I saw a police car's flashing blue lights, then
another's, then I saw an officer with a concerned face and a
crackling radio crouched beside me. I stayed conscious as the
medics arrived and I was loaded into an ambulance -- being filmed
for television, as it turns out, though I have no memory of the
crew's presence.
Being a victim is a hard idea to accept, even while lying in a
hospital bed with tubes in veins, chest, penis and abdomen. The
spirit rebels against the idea of oneself as fundamentally
powerless. So I didn't think much for the first few days about the
meaning of being a victim; I saw no political dimension to my
experience.
As I learned in more detail what had happened I thought, in my
jumbled-up, anesthetized state, about my injured friends --
although everyone survived, their wounds ranged from quite serious
to critical -- and about my wounds and surgery. I also thought
about my assailant. A few facts about him are worth repeating.
Until August 7 Daniel Silva was a self-employed junk dealer and a
homeowner. He was white. He lived with his mother and several dogs.
He had no arrest record. A New Haven police detective who was
hospitalized across the hall from me recalled Silva as a socially
marginal neighborhood character. He was not, apparently, a drug
user. He had told neighbors about much violence in his family --
indeed not long before August 7 he showed one neighbor a scar on
his thigh he said was from a stab wound.
A week earlier, Silva's 79-year-old mother had been hospitalized
for diabetes. After a few days the hospital moved her to a new
room; when Silva saw his mother's empty bed he panicked, but nurses
swiftly took him to her new location. Still, something seemed to
have snapped. Earlier on the day of the stabbings, police say,
Silva released his beloved dogs, set fire to his house, and rode
away on his bicycle as it burned. He arrived on Audubon Street with
a single dog on a leash, evidently convinced his mother was dead.
(She actually did die a few weeks after Silva was jailed.)
While I lay in the hospital, the big story on CNN was the federal
crime bill then being debated in Congress. Even fogged by morphine
I was aware of the irony. I was flat on my back, the result of a
particularly violent assault, while Congress eventually passed the
anti-crime package I had editorialized against in The Nation just a
few weeks earlier. Night after night in the hospital, unable to
sleep, I watched the crime bill debate replayed and heard
Republicans and Democrats (who had sponsored the bill in the first
place) fall over each other to prove who could be the toughest on
crime.
The bill passed on August 21, a few days after I returned home. In
early autumn I actually read the entire text of the crime bill --
all 412 pages. What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the
circumstances compelling: Not a single one of those 412 pages would
have protected me or Anna or Martin or any of the others from our
assailant. Not the enhanced prison terms, not the forty-four new
death penalty offenses, not the three-strikes-you're-out
requirements, not the summary deportations of criminal aliens. And
the new tougher-than-tough anti-crime provisions of the Contract
With America, like the proposed abolition of the Fourth Amendment's
search and seizure protections, offer no more practical protection.
On the other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety net
shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might
have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant --
and thus in the life of someone like me. My assailant's growing
distress in the days before August 7 was obvious to his neighbors.
He had muttered darkly about relatives planning to burn down his
house. A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net might just
have saved me and six others from untold pain and trouble.
From my perspective -- the perspective of a crime victim -- the
Contract With America and its conservative Democratic analogs are
really blueprints for making the streets even less safe. Want to
take away that socialistic income subsidy called welfare? Fine.
Connecticut Governor John Rowland proposes cutting off all benefits
after eighteen months. So more people in New Haven and other cities
will turn to the violence-breeding economy of crack, or emotionally
implode from sheer desperation. Cut funding for those soft-headed
social workers? Fine; let more children be beaten without the
prospect of outside intervention, more Daniel Silvas carrying their
own traumatic scars into violent adulthood. Get rid of the few
amenities prisoners enjoy, like sports equipment, musical
instruments and the right to get college degrees, as proposed by
the Congressional right? Fine; we'll make sure that those inmates
are released to their own neighborhoods tormented with unchanneled
rage.
One thing I could not properly appreciate in the hospital was how
deeply many friends, neighbors and acquaintances were shaken by the
coffeehouse stabbings, let alone strangers who took the time to
write. The reaction of most was a combination of decent horrified
empathy and a clear sense that their own presumption of safety was
undermined.
But some people who didn't bother to aquaint themselves with the
facts used the stabbings as a sort of Rorschach test on which they
projected their own preconceptions about crime, violence and New
Haven. Some present and former Yale students, for instance, were
desperate to see in my stabbing evidence of the great dangers of
New Haven's inner city. One student newspaper wrote about "New
Haven's image as a dangerous town fraught with violence." A student
reporter from another Yale paper asked if I didn't think the attack
proved New Haven needs better police protection. Given the random
nature of this assault -- it could as easily have happened in
wealthy, suburban Greenwich, where a friend of mine was held up at
an ATM at the point of an assault rifle -- it's tempting to dismiss
such sentiments as typical products of an insular urban campus. But
city-hating is central to today's political culture. Newt Gingrich
excoriates cities as hopelessly pestilential, crime-ridden and
corrupt. Fear of urban crime and of the dark-skinned people who
live in cities is the right's basic text, and defunding cities a
central agenda item for the new Congressional majority.
Yet in no small measure it was the institutions of an urban
community that saved my life last August 7. That concerned police
officer who found me and Kerstin Braig on the street was joined in
a moment by enough emergency workers to handle the carnage in and
around the coffeehouse, and his backups arrived quickly enough to
chase down my assailant three blocks away. In minutes I was taken
to Yale-New Haven hospital less than a mile away -- built in part
with the kind of public funding so hated by the right. As I was
wheeled into the E.R., several dozen doctors and nurses descended
to handle all the wounded.
By then my abdomen had swelled from internal bleeding. Dr. Gerard
Burns, a trauma surgeon, told me a few weeks later that I arrived
on his operating table white as a ghost; my prospects, he said,
would have been poor had I not been delivered so quickly, and to an
E.R. with the kind of trauma team available only at a large
metropolitan hospital. In other words, if my stabbing had taken
place in the suburbs I would have bled to death.
Why didn't anyone try to stop him?" That question was even more
common than the reflexive city-bashing. I can't even begin to guess
the number of times I had to answer it. Each time, I repeated that
Silva moved too fast, that it was simply too confusing. And each
time, I found the question not just foolish but offensive.
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" To understand that question is to
understand, in some measure, why crime is such a potent political
issue. To begin with, the question carries not empathy but an
implicit burden of blame; it really asks "Why didn't you stop him?"
It is asked because no one likes to imagine oneself a victim. It's
far easier to graft onto oneself the aggressive power of the
attacker, to embrace the delusion of oneself as Arnold
Schwarzenegger defeating a multitude single-handedly. If I am tough
enough and strong enough I can take out the bad guys.
The country is at present suffering from a huge version of this
same delusion. This myth is buried deep in the political culture,
nurtured in the historical tales of frontier violence and
vigilantism and by the action-hero fantasies of film and
television. Now, bolstered by the social Darwinists of the right,
who see society as an unfettered marketplace in which the strongest
individuals flourish, this delusion frames the crime debate.
I also felt that the question "Why didn't anybody stop him?"
implied only two choices: Rambo-like heroism or abject victimhood.
To put it another way, it suggests that the only possible responses
to danger are the individual biological imperatives of fight or
flight. And people don't want to think of themselves as on the side
of flight. This is a notion whose political moment has arrived. In
last year's debate over the crime bill, conservatives successfully
portrayed themselves as those who would stand and fight; liberals
were portrayed as ineffectual cowards.
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" That question and its underlying
implications see both heroes and victims as lone individuals. But
on the receiving end of a violent attack, the fight-or-flight
dichotomy didn't apply. Nor did that radically individualized
notion of survival. At the coffeehouse that night, at the moments
of greatest threat, there were no Schwarzeneggers, no stand-alone
heroes. (In fact I doubt anyone could have "taken out" Silva; as
with most crimes, his attack came too suddenly.) But neither were
there abject victims. Instead, in the confusion and panic of
life-threatening attack, people reached out to one another. This
sounds simple; yet it suggests there is an instinct for mutual aid
that poses a profound challenge to the atomized individualism of
the right. Cristina Koning helped the wounded Kerstin Braig to
escape, and Kerstin in turn tried to bring Cristina along. Anna and
I, and then Martin and I, clung to each other, pulling one another
toward the door. And just as Kerstin found me on the sidewalk
rather than wait for help alone, so Richard and Emily, who had
never met before, together sought a hiding place around the corner.
Three of us even spoke with Silva either the moment before or the
instant after being stabbed. My plea to Silva may or may not have
been what kept him from pushing his knife all the way through my
chest and into my heart; it's impossible to know what was going
through his mind. But this impulse to communicate, to establish
human contact across a gulf of terror and insanity, is deeper and
more subtle than the simple formulation of fight or flight, courage
or cowardice, would allow.
I have never been in a war, but I now think I understand a little
the intense bond among war veterans who have survived awful
carnage. It is not simply the common fact of survival but the way
in which the presence of these others seemed to make survival
itself possible. There's evidence, too, that those who try to go it
alone suffer more. In her insightful study Trauma and Recovery,
Judith Herman, a psychiatrist, writes about rape victims, Vietnam
War veterans, political prisoners and other survivors of extreme
violence. "The capacity to preserve social connection. . ." she
concludes, "even in the face of extremity, seems to protect people
to some degree against the later development of post-traumatic
syndromes. For example, among survivors of a disaster at sea, the
men who had managed to escape by cooperating with others showed
relatively little evidence of post-traumatic stress afterward." On
the other hand, she reports that the "highly symptomatic" ones
among those survivors were "'Rambos,' men who had plunged into
impulsive, isolated action and not affiliated with others."
The political point here is that the Rambo justice system proposed
by the right is rooted in that dangerous myth of the individual
fighting against a hostile world. Recently that myth got another
boost from several Republican-controlled state legislatures, which
have made it much easier to carry concealed handguns. But the myth
has nothing to do with the reality of violent crime, the ways to
prevent it or the needs of survivors. Had Silva been carrying a
handgun instead of a knife on August 7, there would have been a
massacre.
I do understand the rage and frustration behind the crime-victim
movement, and I can see how the right has harnessed it. For weeks I
thought obsessively and angrily of those minutes on Audubon Street,
when first the nameless woman in the window and then the security
guard refused to approach me -- as if I, wounded and helpless, were
the dangerous one. There was also a subtle shift in my
consciousness a few days after the stabbing. Up until that point,
the legal process and press attention seemed clearly centered on my
injuries and experience, and those of my fellow victims. But once
Silva was arraigned and the formal process of prosecution began, it
became his case, not mine. I experienced an overnight sense of
marginalization, a feeling of helplessness bordering on
irrelevance.
Sometimes that got channeled into outrage, fear and panic. After
arraignment, Silva's bail was set at $700,000. That sounds high,
but just 10 percent of that amount in cash, perhaps obtained
through some relative with home equity, would have bought his
pretrial release. I was frantic at even this remote prospect of
Silva walking the streets. So were the six other victims and our
families. We called the prosecutor virtually hourly to request
higher bail. It was eventually raised to $800,000, partly because
of our complaints and partly because an arson charge was added.
Silva remains in the Hartford Community Correctional Center
awaiting trial.
Near the six-month anniversary of the stabbings I called the
prosecutor and learned that in December Silva's lawyer filed papers
indicating he intends to claim a "mental disease or defect"
defense. If successful it would send him to a maximum-security
hospital for the criminally insane for the equivalent of the
maximum criminal penalty. In February the court was still awaiting
a report from Silva's psychiatrist. Then the prosecution will have
him examined by its own psychiatrist. "There's a backlog," I was
told; the case is not likely to come to trial until the end of 1995
at the earliest. Intellectually, I understand that Silva is
securely behind bars, that the court system is overburdened, that
the delay makes no difference in the long-term outcome. But
emotionally, viscerally, the delay is devastating.
Another of my bursts of victim-consciousness involved the press.
Objectively, I know that many people who took the trouble to
express their sympathy to me found out only through news stories.
And sensitive reporting can for the crime victim be a kind of
ratification of the seriousness of an assault, a reflection of the
community's concern. One reporter for the daily New Haven Register,
Josh Kovner, did produce level-headed and insightful stories about
the Audubon Street attack. But most other reporting was
exploitative, intrusive and inaccurate. I was only a few hours out
of surgery, barely able to speak, when the calls from television
stations and papers started coming to my hospital room. Anna and
Martin, sent home to recover, were ambushed by a Hartford TV crew
as they emerged from their physician's office, and later rousted
from their beds by reporters from another TV station ringing their
doorbell. The Register's editors enraged all seven victims by
printing our home addresses (a company policy, for some reason) and
running spectacularly distressing full-color photos of the crime
scene complete with the coffee bar's bloody windowsill.
Such press coverage inspired in all of us a rage it is impossible
to convey. In a study commissioned by the British Broadcasting
Standards Council, survivors of violent crimes and disasters "told
story after story of the hurt they suffered through the timing of
media attention, intrusion into their privacy and harassment,
through inaccuracy, distortion and distasteful detail in what was
reported." This suffering is not superficial. To the victim of
violent crime the press may reinforce the perception that the world
is an uncomprehending and dangerous place.
The very same flawed judgments about "news value" contribute
significantly to a public conception of crime that is as completely
divorced from the facts as a Schwarzenegger movie. One study a few
years ago found that reports on crime and justice constitute 22-28
percent of newspaper stories, "nearly three times as much attention
as the presidency or the Congress or the state of the economy." And
the most spectacular crimes -- the stabbing of seven people in an
upscale New Haven coffee bar, for instance -- are likely to be the
most "newsworthy" even though they are statistically the least
likely. "The image of crime presented in the media is thus a
reverse image of reality," writes sociologist Mark Warr in a study
commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences.
Media coverage also brings us to another crucial political moral:
The "seriousness" of crime is a matter of race and real estate.
This has been pointed out before, but it can't be said too often.
Seven people stabbed in a relatively affluent, mostly white
neighborhood near Yale University -- this was big news on a slow
news night. It went national over the A.P. wires and international
over CNN's Headline News. It was covered by The New York Times, and
words of sympathy came to New Haven from as far as Prague and
Santiago. Because a graduate student and a professor were among
those wounded, the university sent representatives to the emergency
room. The morning after, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano walked the
neighborhood to reassure merchants and office workers. For more
than a month the regional press covered every new turn in the case.
Horrendous as it was, though, no one was killed. Four weeks later,
a 15-year-old girl named Rashawnda Crenshaw was driving with two
friends about a mile from Audubon Street. As the car in which she
was a passenger turned a corner she was shot through the window and
killed. Apparently her assailants mistook her for someone else.
Rashawnda Crenshaw was black and her shooting took place in the
Hill, the New Haven neighborhood with the highest poverty rate. No
Yale officials showed up at the hospital to comfort Crenshaw's
mother or cut through red tape. The New York Times did not come
calling; there were certainly no bulletins flashed around the world
on CNN. The local news coverage lasted just long enough for
Rashawnda Crenshaw to be buried.
Anyone trying to deal with the reality of crime, as opposed to the
fantasies peddled to win elections, needs to understand the complex
suffering of those who are survivors of traumatic crimes, and the
suffering and turmoil of their families. I have impressive physical
scars: There is a broad purple line from my breastbone to the top
of my pubic bone, an X-shaped cut into my side where the chest tube
entered, a thick pink mark on my chest where the point of Silva's
knife rested on a rib. Then on my back is the unevenly curving
horizontal scar where Silva thrust the knife in and yanked it out,
leaving what looks like a crooked smile. But the disruption of my
psyche is, day in and day out, more noticeable. For weeks after
leaving the hospital I awoke nightly agitated, drenched with
perspiration. For two months I was unable to write; my brain simply
refused to concentrate. Into any moment of mental repose would rush
images from the night of August 7; or alternatively, my mind would
simply not tune in at all. My reactions are still out of balance
and disproportionate. I shut a door on my finger, not too hard, and
my body is suddenly flooded with adrenaline and I nearly faint.
Walking on the arm of my partner, Margaret, one evening I abruptly
shove her to the side of the road; I have seen a tall, lean shadow
on the block where we are headed and am alarmed out of all
proportion. I get into an argument and find myself quaking with
rage for an hour afterward, completely unable to restore calm.
Though to all appearances normal, I feel at a long arm's remove
from all the familiar sources of pleasure, comfort and anger that
shaped my daily life before August 7.
What psychologists call post-traumatic stress disorder is, among
other things, a profoundly political state in which the world has
gone wrong, in which you feel isolated from the broader community
by the inarticulable extremity of experience. I have spent a lot of
time in the past few months thinking about what the world must look
like to those who have survived repeated violent attacks, whether
children battered in their homes or prisoners beaten or tortured
behind bars; as well as those, like rape victims, whose assaults
are rarely granted public ratification.
The right owes much of its success to the anger of crime victims
and the argument that government should do more for us. This appeal
is epitomized by the rise of restitution laws -- statutes requiring
offenders to compensate their targets. On February 7 the House of
Representatives passed, by a vote of 431 to 0, the Victim
Restitution Act, a plank of the Contract With America that would
supposedly send back to jail offenders who don't make good on their
debts to their victims. In my own state, Governor Rowland recently
proposed a restitution amendment to the state Constitution.
On the surface it is hard to argue with the principle of reasonable
restitution -- particularly since it implies community recognition
of the victim's suffering. But I wonder if these laws really will
end up benefiting someone like me -- or if they are just empty,
vote-getting devices that exploit victims and could actually hurt
our chances of getting speedy, substantive justice. H. Scott
Wallace, former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Juvenile Justice, writes in Legal Times that the much-touted Victim
Restitution Act is "unlikely to put a single dollar into crime
victims' pockets, would tie up the federal courts with waves of new
damages actions, and would promote unconstitutional debtors'
prisons."
I also worry that the rhetoric of restitution confuses -- as does
so much of the imprisonment-and-execution mania dominating the
political landscape -- the goals of justice and revenge. Revenge,
after all, is just another version of the individualized,
take-out-the-bad-guys myth. Judith Herman believes indulging
fantasies of revenge actually worsens the psychic suffering of
trauma survivors: "The desire for revenge...arises out of the
victim's experience of complete helplessness," and forever ties the
victim's fate to the perpetrator's. Real recovery from the
cataclysmic isolation of trauma comes only when "the survivor comes
to understand the issues of principle that transcend her personal
grievance against the perpetrator...[a] principle of social justice
that connects the fate of others to her own." The survivors and
victims' families of the Long Island Rail Road massacre have banded
together not to urge that Colin Ferguson be executed but to work
for gun control.
What it all comes down to is this: What do survivors of violent
crime really need? What does it mean to create a safe society? Do
we need courts so overburdened by nonviolent drug offenders that
Daniel Silvas go untried for eighteen months, delays that leave
victims and suspects alike in limbo? Do we need to throw nonviolent
drug offenders into mandatory-sentence proximity with violent
sociopaths and career criminals? Do we need the illusory bravado of
a Schwarzenegger film -- or the real political courage of those
L.I.R.R. survivors?
If the use of my picture on television unexpectedly brought me face
to face with the memory of August 7, some part of the attack is
relived for me daily as I watch the gruesome, voyeuristically
reported details of the stabbing deaths of two people in
California, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was relived
even more vividly by the televised trial of Colin Ferguson. (One
night recently after watching Ferguson on the evening news I
dreamed that I was on the witness stand and Silva, like Ferguson,
was representing himself and questioning me.) Throughout the trial,
as Ferguson spoke of falling asleep and having someone else fire
his gun, I heard neither cowardly denial nor what his first lawyer
called "black rage"; I heard Daniel Silva's calm, secure voice
telling me I killed his mother. And when I hear testimony by the
survivors of that massacre -- on a train as comfortable and
familiar to them as my neighborhood coffee bar -- I feel a great
and incommunicable fellowship.
But the public obsession with these trials, I am convinced, has no
more to do with the real experience of crime victims than does the
anti-crime posturing of politicians. I do not know what made my
assailant act as he did. Nor do I think crime and violence can be
reduced to simple political categories. I do know that the answers
will not be found in social Darwinism and atomized individualism,
in racism, in dismantling cities and increasing the destitution of
the poor. To the contrary: Every fragment of my experience suggests
that the best protections from crime and the best aid to victims
are the very social institutions most derided by the right. As
crime victim and citizen what I want is the reality of a safe
community -- not a politician's fantasyland of restitution and
revenge. That is my testimony.
Copyright (c) 1995, The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved.
Electronic redistribution for nonprofit purposes is permitted,
provided this notice is attached in its entirety. Unauthorized,
for-profit redistribution is prohibited. For further information
regarding reprinting and syndication, please call The Nation at
(212) 242-8400, ext. 226 or send e-mail to Max Block at
mblock@thenation.com.
_________________________________________________________________
HOME
This Week | Subscribe | About The Nation | Alert | Forums
Audio | Archives | Search | Hot List | Marketspace | Survey
webmanager@TheNation.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
