BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy by Ali Velshi
This is a powerful treatise, conveying messages extremely important and timely.
This absorbing family history is worthy of more than five stars.
EXCERPTS:
If we want to prevent the murder of the next George Floyd, it will require more than just reforming the way we police. It will require us to build a society where the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship—and the responsibilities of citizenship—are shared by all. As my family’s hundred-year journey illustrates, for far too many people, achieving true citizenship and belonging in a new country is no easy endeavor. It can be long, arduous, and beset by discouraging setbacks at every turn. And for all of us as a society to work together to build a shared notion of citizenship, to build a truly united there are those who still maintain a sort of “yes, but” defense of Great Britain’s imperial project: that it was worthwhile because, in the end, the British left their former subjects with the rule of law and better railroads and “Western values.”
The ill effects of colonialism were compounded by environmental catastrophe. Waves of drought parched and devastated the land, wiping out whole crops and herds of livestock, leading to mass starvation. In the first half of the nineteenth century there were seven famines that killed, by conservative estimates, around eight hundred thousand people. The second half of the nineteenth century was worse, bringing seven additional famines that killed over 15 million. All the while, tons of Indian wheat were being exported to feed the British back home, and the money and resources that might have eased the devastation caused by famine had gone elsewhere, taken by the British and used to support their various military adventures overseas. The starving people of India were left with no choice but to go elsewhere themselves. Between 1830 and 1870, nearly 2 million workers left the country in search of better prospects. That was the Big Bang. The Indian diaspora was born.
In a cruel twist of fate, they left their homes and their families to toil on behalf of the same empire that had devastated their native land and forced them onto the open seas in the first place.
Scandal: when companies like MCI and WorldCom and Enron were caught cooking their books to hide billions of dollars in losses from investors. We covered those stories ad nauseam, and it was the first time that we, as financial journalists, confronted the idea that some of the people who we are all excited to have on our TV stations were a bunch of crooks. Then came cascading crises of confidence in our institutions and leadership: the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown. As I traveled the world reporting, going to places like Hong Kong and India, people would ask me, “Why can’t you guys be more like Al Jazeera?” Meaning: “When are you guys going to stop being ESPN and really report the news and hold people to account?”
I can remember being at CNN the night that Barack Obama was elected, back in the days when CNN had twenty people at a time in the newsroom in rows of desks. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. We were all caught up in watching history unfold, and I was thinking, “This is it. This was the big thing America needed to do that it hadn’t done, and now we’ve broken through that.” Even if you didn’t buy into the absurdities about a “postracial America,” there was a sense that we’d made a giant leap forward, and it was almost impossible to imagine things going backward from there. Obama himself leaned hard on Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous formulation that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” But with all due respect to both of those men, that’s not actually true. It’s wishful thinking that people need to abandon because it breeds a complacency that things will just continue to get better on their own. Everything about my family’s story tells me that the arc of history bends the way you bend it. That was true with the National Party in South Africa in 1948, it was true with Idi Amin in Uganda in 1972, and it’s been true in America for quite some time. For the past fifty years, extremist right-wingers have been bending it the way they wanted, and with Trump’s election, we finally got to the result of their efforts.
Everyone knew they were breaking curfew and were subject to arrest. These people, thousands of them, had taken it upon themselves to take that risk. But they were just walking, and there was no threat that called for an armed response. I’ve covered the G8 and the G20, these international conferences that draw all kinds of rock-throwing anarchists and the like, and every cop in every major city on earth learned years ago: if you’re trying to control a crowd, you don’t incite the crowd. It’s never good. So the minute they opened fire, I knew it was the result of a deliberate choice. Subsequent recordings that came out indicated, especially when it came to journalists, cops were on a hunt that night. They were jacked up. They were pumped up to do this, and we were fair game. The Minneapolis police chief himself was a decent, honest official, but his power was hamstrung by the police union, and the head of the police union in Minneapolis was a big Trumper.
So you had some cops who were juiced on this whole Trumpian mantra of “You need to rough people up a bit.” Because other than that, there was no reason to do it. None. But they did it. They were excited to do it, and they continued to do it for hours all over the city. They chased people down. It was completely unnecessary, and it was wrong. A few months later, the whole episode came up again because Trump started ranting about it on the campaign trail as part of his whole attack on the media. “I remember this guy Velshi,” he said, recounting the incident. “He got hit in the knee with a canister of tear gas and he went down. He was down. ‘My knee, my knee.’” He was wrong about every detail, by the way. It’s all on video. But Trump makes up lies even when he doesn’t need to.
The truly disturbing part of Trump’s speech was what came next, when he lavished praise on the police for attacking an American journalist. “It was the most beautiful thing,” Trump said, “because after we take all that crap for weeks and weeks, and you finally see men get up there and go right through them, wasn’t it really a beautiful sight?” Then the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.
What makes it important is not only that armed agents of the state believe that it’s OK to take unprovoked shots at both civilians and journalists but also that millions of American citizens are willing to cheer that on. It is chilling to realize there is a large and vocal faction in this country that is ready to burn it to the ground before they’ll share it with anyone who doesn’t look like them or doesn’t think like them. They stand ready to tear down everything that makes America special—indeed, everything that makes America possible, like the right to vote and the right to a free and independent press.
Up until Minneapolis, I thought of myself as someone covering those fights. It was only when I got shot that I fully realized I was in the fight. That belated realization came, in part, simply because, even as a brown guy in Donald Trump’s America, the system continued to work fine for me. It still works fine for me to this day. I make a good living. I go about my life without any real fears for my physical safety. I worry about larger societal problems, but day to day I’m good, which means I have a certain perspective on the promise of this land and I could easily go right on taking that promise as guaranteed. But I can’t anymore, because I know that promise is not guaranteed. To any of us.
It has to be good enough for all of us. As has been said many times by those much wiser than me, if one of us is in chains, none of us are free.
It’s not enough for society to be good enough for some of us. It has to be good enough for all of us. As has been said many times by those much wiser than me, if one of us is in chains, none of us are free. This is what my father and mother and sister knew. It’s what my grandparents and great-grandparents knew, despite their total lack of a formal education. Justice isn’t justice until it’s universal.
