Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 21

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee

Chloe Cooper Jones wrote an article for The Verge chronicling the post-fame life of Ramsey Orta. Ramsey Orta was briefly famous in 2014, though not for the type of things most people get famous over. He was the man who filmed a cop choking Eric Garner to death in New York City.

I don’t want to spend too much time summarizing Jones’s article – mostly because she tells Orta’s story better than I can – but to give a quick run-down, Orta was trailed by cops, harassed, and eventually arrested on maybe-propped-up-but-definitely-exagerrated gun charges after coming forward with the film. He’s still in prison. He’s got anxiety. He’s got a checkered past – he once held a knife to a kid’s throat in junior high – and he admits it. At prison, they tried feeding him rat poison. He didn’t eat it. Now they destroy any food his family sends him so that he has to eat what they serve.

Here’s what I want to talk about: democracy. On paper, we live in a country that is by and for the people. We have a right to vote, a right to elect. We can choose whether or not to exercise that right, but regardless of our choice, we are all beholden to the (popular) outcome. Of course, nothing’s perfect, and some peoples’ voices don’t sound quite as loud as others – there’s whole textbooks full of laws to ensure we have uneven representation. But still, a vote’s a vote, and your vote does have power. This is what we, as a country, have voted for: feeding a man rat poison for trying to save his friend.

There was some commotion across the street from the bank today. Someone reported gunshots, someone else said there was an accident. On the way to lunch, I saw three cop cars and one ambulance by a bus stop. The cops were talking to a black man. Another black man was watching some distance away. I tried to get a good read on the situation – no guns were out, no one was dead or dying. I decided not to stop. When I passed back the same way after lunch, the cops were still out there with the black man. He was wearing red. He had a baseball cap.

I didn’t do anything. My thought was – this seems safe; no-one’s on the ground; everything’s fine. And maybe it was. Or, maybe they’ll arrest him for whatever reason – good or bad – and cart him off to a cell where they stomp on his ramen and put rat pellets in his meatloaf. Who knows?

The point is, I’m responsible. Good or bad, freedom or tyranny, you and I are responsible. Every man or woman that’s beaten, abused, or murdered by government action is blood on your hands. In very limited cases, that blood might be justified. But look in the eyes of Ramsey Orta and tell me – are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?

Novel Count: 30,740

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami; FINISHED! 

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Paranoia and fear form their own prison, one Orta is likely to live in for the rest of his life.
Do you wish you could go back and do it differently? Not take the video?
I’d waited a year, known him a year, before I asked this question. He looks away from me and lowers his head.
Finally he says, “What does it matter?”

Chloe Cooper Jones, Fearing for His Life, published March 13th 2019 on The Verge