Proverbs 18, Verse 6 & 7
"A fool gets into constant fights. His mouth is his undoing!
His words endanger him."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
As soon as I saw the picture, I cringed. Not because it was disappointing or revolting or wrong-- because it was lovely. Because I knew what was coming. Down, down below.
In the unruly bowels of the Comment Section. But we'll get to that. Unfortunately. For now, let's focus on the positive.
The picture I saw, that lovely, cringeworthy picture featured two beautiful African-American women dressed in pale-blue short-sleeved shirts. The older one has her left hand resting on her belt, and she gazes knowingly at the younger one, who smiles back with a disarming air of innocence, but meeting the gaze upon her ounce-for-ounce. Mom wears badge #3636, and has worn it every day for twenty years. Daughter is just getting used to #1523.
Mother, Beverly, after twenty long years in a rough district, will retire in a few months. Daughter, Sicily, seems to know how lucky she is: "I can say that not many people get the opportunity to do something that they enjoy doing with someone they love, respect, and look up to - and I have that right here. I have that right here."
I wonder, when Philadelphia Daily News writer Stephanie Farr, no stranger to the Philadelphia Police Department, and what writing about its men and women, can bring about, ever considered that writing a beautiful, honest, touching story about a mother and her daughter policing the same city, in the same District, might evoke in her readers. Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew and she didn't care.
"Passing the Baton," written about Beverly and Sicily Milligan, will hopefully, one day, be a story that never needs to get written-- because mothers and daughters on a big city police force together will be as commonplace as a father and a son ("my dad was a cop, my uncles are all cops, my grandfather was a cop, my great-great grandfather's muttonchops were cops, etc"). One day there won't need to be an article like Stephanie Farr's. One day there won't need to be a Pride Day, either. Because we'll all just... get it.
Well, maybe not all of us will.
My cringestinct proved to be right on the money about Philly.com's readership, and their worldliness. Their openmindedness. Their social graces. Their abhorrent, revolting, repugnant racism.
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Six out of twenty-eight comments. Though, if I ran Philly.com, I'd probably have gotten rid of at least five more, but that's where subjectivity comes in, I suppose. Maybe I'd be a heavy-handed kind of editor. Maybe I'd be the kind of editor who abolished comment sections altogether, because I don't really understand why they have to exist. Not to sound like a holier-than-thou curmudgeon-in-training, but I got my first Letter to the Editor published in the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was seventeen years old. And there were approximately two dozen after that, in papers around the nation (I have a big mouth-- you're just figuring this out now?) and in Canada. Some of them, looking back on it now, weren't worth the paper they were printed on, but someone with a desk and a phone (and probably suspenders and a combover) decided that they at the very least came from the heart, and that somebody out there would benefit from reading what I had to say. My letters were vetted. Michael McCombover gave them a pass. He called me to verify my identity and then, the next day, or in a few days, I got to enjoy seeing my words and my name in print.
These commenters don't get vetted. And they never see their names-- just their avatars and their screennames. And the vitriol that they spew doesn't need to get read by anybody. Certainly not Beverly and Sicily Milligan who, I'm sure, as police officers, no, as BLACK police officers, no, as FEMALE BLACK police officers have been and will be called everything in the book and beyond. They're big girls, I get it, they can take it. But why subject them to the disgusting barbarity of anonymous, atrocious words of hate and ignorance in what should be their finest hour: appearing together, side-by-side, looking like the picture of pride and beauty-- no: Honor, Integrity, Service. Why? Didn't the people who run Philly.com know what was going to happen? Why couldn't they have closed the comments for that article.
No. Just assign some poor intern to sit at a computer screen and give him/her instructions to hit "Refresh" every four seconds and delete the first "N-word" comment that pops up. Why? Because of freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Freedom of shittalking shit to behave like shit. These are the freedoms people like those commenters love to defend, while conveniently forgetting about "and liberty and justice for ALL."
For 22nd District Officers Sicily and Beverly Milligan.
I am so very grateful to Stephanie Farr for writing that eloquent, heartfelt piece, but I hope to God one day will come when she won't need to, and her editor won't need to block comments or delete comments or wonder about what the comments will be and fuck the comments.
Fuck them.
Hate-filled trash just terrified of a world where a black woman could grow up to do a thankless job like her mom, a world where she could slip her hand into a white glove, hold it up and swear to protect, serve, defend, and possibly take a bullet for a heartless bastard who would never even think about doing the same.
One day maybe we won't need an article like "Passing the Baton." But, I'm ashamed to say, in 2014, we definitely do, and maybe it's good that we are allowed to see why. Even if all we can see is This comment was deleted.
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