Time for the Leaders to Lead

The tragic shooting deaths of two New York City police officers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn over the weekend is a grim reminder of how America has lost its way, allowing hatred, partisanship, and revenge to overwhelm tolerance, cooperation, and reason.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in their car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues when Ismaaiyl Brinsley fired several shots without warning. Police and city officials called the attack an assassination.

Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, said it was a sign of how Mayor Bill de Blasio had made police a target. Others shot disdainful looks at President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the tens of thousands of protesters who have expressed outrage after several incidents in which white police officers have killed unarmed black men and children without facing charges.

Regrettably, very few people in positions of authority noted or took stock of the violence that permeates our society at a time when crime is steadily declining. That Brinsley was armed with a misguided grudge, a silver Taurus 9-millimeter handgun, and a history of mental issues was ignored during the effort to score rhetorical points.

Take Lynch for example. The head of the NYPD's largest police union was quick to say that the officers' blood "starts on the steps of City Hall" in general and "in the office of the mayor" in particular. He also lead a protest in which police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital where the officers were pronounced dead.

Others have warned that the shootings of the two officers, both of whom are being mourned by their family, friends, fellow officers, and the citizenry, were acts of war.

According to a message attributed to police, but which the PBA denies issuing, the NYPD has become "a 'wartime' police department."

"We will act accordingly," the missive declared.

Meanwhile, a who's who of reactionary Republican politicians from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to former New York Gov. George Pataki to U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, assailed de Blasio for expressing support for the rights of protesters, saying he had created a dangerous climate for police officers by indulging lawlessness.

Ignored, of course, is a very basic truth: when police and civilians do not trust each other, do not work together, do not seek common ground then we are all in danger. And when those who are supposed to lead retreat to their partisan rhetorical corners nothing will ever be accomplished.

Let us understand some very simply things. America has married the worship of guns to a delegitimizing of authority -- an authority often steeped in abuse and overreach. Because Brinsley allegedly cited the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson as reasons for his rampage, few people are looking at the things that are at the heart of such violence. 

The deaths of Officers Liu and Ramos are not the manifestation of protests against excessive police abuse. Nor are their deaths the desired result that most people sought in voicing their displeasures with police actions. Their deaths can be tied to a mental health system that is almost non-existent, our gun culture, the inability to see each other's humanity, the rationalization of excessive violence in the name of safety, and on and on and on.

When James Eagan Holmes opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., on July 20, 2012, conservatives, Republicans, and the National Rifle Association went to great lengths to blame the violence on a single twisted mind, arguing that those deaths had nothing to do with lax gun policies and over the top rhetoric that adulated guns. The same occurred when Adam Lanza killed 26 innocent children in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.

We heard it again when many defended the torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency, and others decided that Garner died not because of pressure applied to his throat and chest, but because he was obese and had asthma.

The humanity of those who died was denied.

For example, in making his claims that the citizenry hates the police, Lynch failed to recognize that it was the mother of Brinsley's shooting victim in Baltimore who sought to help police find him, and it was two civilians who followed an armed and dangerous Brinsley to the subway station so as to point him out to police.

Members of a society that hates police do not take such action. Yes, there are those who in their ignorance will rejoice in the officers' deaths. Such people are not reflective of society. Many people in this country have either friends or relatives who are police officers, and those people worry each night if those loved ones will return home.

It is the same with civilians who wonder if their parents, siblings, relatives, and friends will make it home at night, who fear that a life can be easily snuffed by a person puffed on his or her own sense of authority.

It is why everyone who seeks to end or to at least curb the violence must speak up. 

So far, it has been the protesters and the families of those who have suffered the most at the hands of the violence that have been the most reasonable.

"I hope and pray that we can reflect on this tragic loss of life that has occurred so that we can move forward and find an amicable path to a peaceful coexistence," Lucy Ramos, an aunt of Officer Rafael Ramos, said late Sunday afternoon.

"An act of violence is against humanity," Carmen Perez, a co-founder of Justice League NYC, told The New York Times in an interview. "It's not mutually exclusive. We can mourn Eric Garner and the two officers. It's O.K. to do that."

Indeed it is.

"We need to use the pain that all of us are experiencing and turn it into purpose," Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president, said, adding that "calling for police reform is not a call for harm of police officers."

Adams' words reflect the reasonable response that many seek and the city so desperately needs. To question police department tactics and policies is not to attack police.

The problem is that for too many anything short of total capitulation and admiration of the police is an attack on the nation's men and women in blue.

But somewhere along the line, the good police and the good citizens have to come to grips with a fundamental truth: As long as the bad guys operate with impunity, regardless of whether they are police officers or rogue citizens, all of us are in danger.

And no amount of partisan rhetoric will change that.  

The Insanity of America's Cuba Policy

Insanity, people say, is doing something the same way over and over, and expecting different results. That also has been the definition of United States policy toward Cuba, and those who have sought to maintain that misdirected policy.

For a little more than half a century America has waged an economic war against the island nation and its people in an effort to topple the Castro regime. It hasn't worked. Fidel Castro, who stepped down as President in 2008, outlasted 10 U.S. presidents before turning power over to his younger brother, Raul. Still, too many political hacks have wanted to stick with the same outdated and unproductive policies toward Cuba. They were unable or unwilling to recognize that something different was needed.

President Barack Obama finally made the correct decision for them: On Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2014, he announced the United States would seek to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Under the agreement, the United States will open an embassy in Havana, and Obama will call for the lifting of the Cuban embargo. In addition, Cuba released Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned there for 5 years, and another man who had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. The United States released three Cubans convicted of espionage. (Early reports of the agreement also suggested that Cuba would release more than 50 political prisoners.)

"We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries," Obama said. "These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked. It's time for a new approach."

Obama's noon announcement from the White House was met with the usual hand wringing, hyperbole, and kvetching.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida blasted Obama's actions as "another concession to tyranny," and vowed that he and other Republicans would do all in their power to thwart Obama's efforts, particularly any efforts to roll back the economic embargo.

"This whole new policy is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people. All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to stay in power," the Cuban-American senator said -- as if the Castro government was set to fall any minute now.

Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey was just as opposed. "Let's be clear," said Menendez, who is Cuban-American, "this was not a 'humanitarian' act by the Castro regime. It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American. President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Castro government."

Republican presidential wannabe Jeb Bush said Obama was rewarding the Castro brothers' "heinous" behavior, a remarkable comment considering it was Jeb's brother who defiled America's reputation abroad through mendacity, torture, and an unjustified, decades-long war in Iraq.

Of course the irony and hypocrisy of the criticisms are lost on Republicans, many of whom have spent the last week or so defending the torture methods used during George W. Bush's administration. According to Republicans, Obama's overtures to Cuba are misguided because the Castro brothers preside over a corrupt and totalitarian government that does not respect democratic principles.

That should sound very familiar to the party that added a possible bailout of the nation's six largest banks in a must pass budget bill; shut down the federal government to get its way; oversaw a sweeping expansion of government spying on its own citizens; passed laws that made it harder for people to vote; seeks to deny women control over their own bodies; pushes a conservative Christian theocracy in a nation founded on the principles of the separation of church and state; is shamelessly in the pockets of corporate America, particularly the Koch brothers; seeks to deny health care to poor Americans; and justifies police killings of unarmed black men by saying its black people's fault police are killing them. 

Nonetheless, many Cuban-Americans in Union City, N.J., and Miami showed muted enthusiasm. While many of the older generation lamented that nothing will change for Cubans until the Castro brothers were gone, many in the younger generation were delighted that the United States and their homeland would move toward normalization.

As they should be.

The issues that have kept this country from correcting a five-decade old wrong are dying with many of those who fled Cuba after Fidel's fighters moved from the mountains into the Presidential Palace.

Surveys by Gallup since 1999 show a shift in how Americans view Cuba, with a majority -- ranging from 55 percent to 71 percent at any given time -- favoring normalizing diplomatic relations. Among Cuban-Americans, support for normalization ran as high as 79 percent in Florida and 73 percent nationwide. A similar poll by Florida International University found that 68 percent of Cuban Americans favor normalized diplomatic relations, while 69 percent want travel restrictions relaxed, and 52 percent want the embargo lifted, according to an article published on The Atlantic's web site.  In addition, the old Cold War complaint that Cuba is a communist country no longer carries the same weight considering U.S. relations with Russia, China, and Vietnam.

That so many Americans would want an end to an economic war on a country whose most serious crime appears to have been an association with this country's worst Cold War enemy has not moved Republicans.

"I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it," Jeb Bush said in a speech earlier this month. According to The Miami Herald, "the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba's exiled elite, applauded loudly."

But not loud enough to drown out the calls for America to end one of its longest and possibly most unjust wars in history.