The castle walls expand ever further
It is now okay to kill people you don't want to see in public
In the past few weeks, it has become increasingly clear that you can be assaulted in America for just about anything. Whether its ringing the wrong doorbell, getting into the wrong car at the grocery store, or making the unreasonable request of asking your neighbor to not shoot his AR-15 in his backyard in the middle of the night, violence is one wrong social interaction away.
These stories are already indicitave of the rapidly decaying social fabric of our country, where the slightest provocation in public results in injury or death thanks to our lax gun ownership laws. Now, a story out of New York has shaken me to my core and shows that something sociopathic rests underneath discussions of self-defense and public misunderstandings.
https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1653608368773435392?s=20
An unhoused man, Jordan Neely, had a very public crisis on the New York City subway, yelling that “he had no food, he had no drink, that he was tired and doesn’t care if he goes to jail”. A bystander was apparently so threatened by Jordan’s distress that he held Jordan in a chokehold for fifteen minutes, choking him to death while bystanders watched.
Let’s be clear: an unhoused man was very upset about not having a place to live. He had a public mental breakdown and screamed on the train, almost certainly anguished about how hard his life was. A random subway passenger, annoyed and distressed, decided that Jordan should die for this unthinkable crime. He choked him for 15 minutes on the train while everyone watched. The New York Post published a photo of this, with the headline saying: “NYC subway passenger putting unhinged man in deadly chokehold”. The New York Times added some abiguity to it: “A 30-year-old man died on the subway on Monday after he was placed in a chokehold, the police said. Witnesses said the victim had been acting in a “hostile and erratic manner” toward passengers on the train when the other man, 24, moved to restrain him.”
A man killed another man for yelling on the subway. The NYPD let the killer go with no charges.
Go to the comments of any news article about this event, and you will find a head-spinning amount of people who think that Jordan deserved to die. Pedantic Twitter Blue users at the top of the replies were quick to argue about whether or not the chokehold was actually “deadly”. Social media accounts whose sole purpose is to stir up paranoia about crime in major American cities were quick to find anecdotes about others who had encountered Jordan and felt unsafe. Some argued that taking off his jacket was sign that Jordan was ready to assault someone. Many argued that all citizens have a right to self-defense from “unhinged bums”.
In just a few short years, we’ve gone from self-defense as something you have a right to when your home is burgled to something you can claim in just about any situation. Just like cops can claim almost any excuse for why they felt justified in killing an unarmed person during routine interactions, everyday citizens (armed to the teeth) are empowered to kill or maim anyone who accidentally crosses their path or irritates them. The Castle Doctrine now applies to the kingdom of the self. Any percieved attempt to breach your walls calls for retaliation.
Why is this happening? There are too many reasons to list. The manufactured media panic for the past 3 years about crime in American cities. Already lax concealed carry laws that have been loosened even further. Demonization of the homeless and poor populations that have exploded thanks to skyrocketing living costs and low wages. Destruction of public spaces where you can exist without spending money.
Demonization of the poor, and by extension The Other, plays an especially big role in all this. We’ve been inundated by madenning stories of crime in cities, mostly shared by panicked suburbanites who don’t live there. Rising inequality has caused a rift where the bottom of the income range continues to get bigger and more people fall out of our society and land on the streets. The people who have only gotten richer now have to see it and cannot handle seeing their distress, and wish it would just go away. We remove benches and close bathrooms and crush encampments and just wish they would all go somewhere else. But there’s nowhere for them to go. The unhoused and impoverished live in public because that’s where they can go. They get no privacy; no dignity.
I ride public transit for all my daily trips, because I can’t afford to buy a car at this point in my life. Because Houston is much easier to navigate with a car, only the most desparate in our city use the bus system. Riding the bus will sometimes put me next to people who are struggling more than I could ever imagine. Some may use drugs, some may not have a steady place to live or a job. Some of them yell on the bus or cry or argue with strangers. It is an uncomfortable experience. It isn’t easy to see or particularly pleasant. But never have I decided that any of them should die because it made me feel weird.
Let me ask you a hypothetical. If you had to live on the street, unable to bathe or shit or sleep in peace, could you handle it? Would you be able to stay cool if you didn’t know where your next meal would come from or where you would rest that night? If you had to live your entire life in public with all your belongings in plastic bags, would you be able to stay sane? Would you be able to keep your calm on the bus or the subway or on the street corner you call home?
I couldn’t. That experience is so far from my lived experience that I can’t really wrap my head around it. I certainly don’t think I could sit quietly while it all happened to me. Our society has failed our most vulnerable members so miserably, and we continue to demonize them, and when they respond to that cruelty we kill them with our bare hands.
If this piece is incoherent, it’s because I just cannot take it anymore. I can’t hear about crime or urban decay anymore. I can’t listen to people who claim that Downtown Houston looks like a zombie film because of all the people there who may or may not be on drugs. What happened to Jordan Neely is the logical conclusion to all of the public outcry about homelessness. It isn’t enough to have police sweep our unhoused off the streets. We can’t give them money or a place to live or safe places to shoot up. The system responds by allowing the angriest and most unhinged members of society to kill people that they don’t see as human in public, while all of us watch. We have to do better than this, or we will lose the last shred of humanity we have left.