One of the most distressing things to me in considering the Trayvon Martin case is the sobering reality that had George Zimmerman had a badge we likely never would have even heard of Trayvon Martin.  His life, in all likelihood, would have passed unremarked outside of maybe a few local news stories and a small protest or candle light vigil attended by family and friends.

Why do I think this?  Because it happens all the time.  Police brutality, which goes hand in hand with the militarization of the police, is a pervasive reality.  Consider these three videos.

There are a few things to note about these videos.  The first is that I didn’t have to search to find them.  I just picked three, but if you look at the links that come up when you watch these it’s easy to see that there are countless similar videos, some too disturbing to even watch.   Likewise with a few Google searches you can find numerous websites that track these things.  They are generally taken about as seriously and receive about as much attention as your average conspiracy theory website.

Secondly, let’s consider who the victims are in these videos.  In the first one we have a young black male being brutally beaten by a white cop, and then tazed multiple times while incapacitated as other white male cops stand around.  In the second we see a black male officer beating another black male senseless with his baton, while a white or Latino male officer stands by as backup.  Finally, in the third we see a white male officer savagely kick a white female who was handcuffed, seated, and intoxicated in the head.  So police brutality is not merely a racial thing (although I don’t doubt that a strong case could be made that black males are on the receiving end more than any one other group).

No, police brutality is a power thing.  It is the result of a culture that says that some are above the law.  A culture of intimidation that views officers not as the agents of the people, hired to protect and serve, but as the hired thugs of the state, free to use whatever means necessary or preferred to carry out the will of the state, usually motivated by a financial incentive (i.e. traffic stops, the war on drugs, etc.).  The kind of men we see in the videos above are not just a few bad apples, and they didn’t just have a moment.  As mentioned above these kinds of events happen routinely, and it is not uncommon for those who engage in such brutality to keep their jobs or be hired by another force.  Further, the ability to carry out the sustained beating of an unarmed person, to hear bones cracking, screams, pleas for help, to witness the body of a teenage boy convulsing under electrical shock when he is already incapacitated, the willingness to kick a woman in the face for a minor offense—these are not typical human capacities.  I’m not saying that humans are not naturally capable of great evil—we surely are.  But most of us simply would not do these kinds of thing.  This kind of behavior is developed.  It requires de-sensitization.  It is developed by an internal culture that winks at violence and corruption, that begins to find a thrill in violent encounters, that finds its self-worth bolstered by being outfitted with greater and greater authority and more militaristic equipment and assignments.  Permanent SWAT teams create police-soldiers.

But perhaps more disconcerting than the internal culture prevalent within so many law enforcement agencies is the external culture that tolerates and even celebrates it.  I watched in horror a few months ago as the city of Boston was literally taken over and shut down by the military-police complex in a search for two (and then one) teenage boys.  Armored vehicles with gun turrets drove through the streets aiming at anyone they pleased.  The right against unreasonable search and seizure was wholly suspended as families were forced out of their homes at gunpoint—women and children with military rifles pointed at them simply because they were there, in their homes.  Businesses were forced to close as citizens were told to stay in their homes.  And despite the fact that all of this proved wholly ineffective and the suspect was found by a regular citizen just outside the militarized perimeter moments after the lock-down was lifted, the nation celebrated all of this.  We took a sort of perverse pride in the lengths that the state would go to to “keep us safe,” never noting the irony that our safety came at the expense of the law, at the expense of any semblance of liberty, and at the end of a gun barrel.  Nevertheless we lauded the effort as nothing but heroism and congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

Similarly, when it came out that an armed and violent criminal was eventually just burned to death in a cabin because it was taking too long to try and capture him there was no outrage.  Once again we cheered.  We got the bad guy.  But at what cost?  Of course Dorner was an evil man, and of course it’s hard to have much sympathy for him, but this isn’t about sympathy.  It’s about precedent.  It’s about a police department that shot two innocent people in a moving vehicle and then essentially said, “oops sorry about that.”  It’s about a police department that decided it was up to them when to just kill someone rather than make every effort to capture him and put him to justice via a trial.

These and countless other examples from Waco and Ruby Ridge to the purveyors of raw milk who routinely have their homes invaded and property destroyed, to the kids walking down the street who don’t look right and end up the victim of an armed man’s god complex tell a story of a growing lawlessness in our culture.  If the politicians aren’t bound by the law (and we know that’s been the case for a long time), and their armed enforcement personnel aren’t bound by the law, the law has effectively ceased to function.  It is now just another tool for the manipulation and coercion of the populace, to be used as a pretext for abusing those already in a position of relative weakness, those who are already at a power deficit, while the powerful, the elite remain impervious to its strictures.

And so we return to Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.  I am convinced that neither I nor most of the rest of the population have enough knowledge to really understand fully all the rights and wrongs of the way things ended up.  But two things do stand out to me.

One is that Zimmerman behaved foolishly by following Martin after he was told not to.  At some level his behavior seems to have been provocative.  But more than that, as others have noted, Zimmerman may well have been acting and thinking as he thought a cop would.  He evidently greatly admired the police and aspired toward law enforcement himself.  Could it be that his aggressive behavior, his unwillingness to let it go and to leave the situation alone, came down to his perception of what it meant to be involved in law enforcement?  Provoking and then responding with overwhelming force?  I don’t know, but it seems like a real possibility.

The second thing that stands out is what I started with.  If Zimmerman had actually been a cop I have a hard time believing we would have heard about this story.  Yet in a sane world, had he been a cop he should have been held to an even higher standard.  Police are given training to defuse tense and violent situations, and invested with a veritable monopoly on the use of force in public society.  They ought to be held to the strictest levels of accountability in the use of violence precisely because they are naturally in a position that without that kind of oversight lends itself to the abuse of power and corruption.  Yet what we see today is just the opposite.  A citizen who at least was able to make a case that he killed in self-defense (albeit perhaps preceded by foolish and provocative behavior) is being crucified in the media, in pop-culture, even by the federal government.  And yet story can be piled on top of story of abuse and even murder by law enforcement officers just over the period of time since Trayvon’s death and it goes unremarked on by the media and unnoticed by the population.<>cервис продвижения рекламы

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1.618…Does that number ring a bell? Here’s an illustration of it:

Beautiful, right? I knew you’d think so.  If you’re not convinced, here’s another picture of it:

Still not convinced? Too bad, it’s beautiful whether you like it or not.

Okay, maybe third time’s a charm:

Ah, that’s better.  Now everyone agrees.  It’s beautiful.

1.618… to 1 is a ratio. A “Golden Ratio.” Even more than that, it’s a proportion, and it’s beautiful. I know so, because God has filled his creation with it, and He doesn’t make junk. From the minutest DNA double-helix, to the most grandiose, spiral galaxy imaginable, God has knit His universe with a stitch that is just over 1.618 times as wide as it is long.

That’s another cool thing about it. It’s not 1.618 exactly. God shows us glorious things, but He also helps us remember that we are but clay. It’s an “irrational number”, meaning that it’s not the ratio of two integers.  It’s like π. You know, the circumference of a circle divided by it’s diameter, which equals 3.14 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  It’s also like the hypotenuse of a right triangle with two, 1 unit legs.  What could be simpler than that, right?  What could be simpler than the square root of a little, bitty number like 2?

The Golden Ratio, Pi, and the square root of two are all infinitely incommensurate gaps in an infinitely dense number line. Go figure. We’re not God. We will never reach the end of His spoken world, nor ever plumb its depths. After all,

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements—surely you know!

Or who stretched the line upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,

or who laid its cornerstone,

when the morning stars sang together

and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

At the same time, man, created in God’s image, was able to blast a tube of metal into the heavens with living people inside, intersect the orbit of the moon, enter its orbit, land on that great, big hunk of cheese, go for a stroll, ride a very heavy dune buggy, collect some rocks, then re-launch to make their return trip to earth, and survive. That’s beautiful. How did we do that with all these irrational numbers floating around?

We can do great and beautiful things because we, and everything in creation, were created by the God who is One and Three.  One God, Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is the One and the Many.  He is Unity and Diversity. He is Universal and Particular. He likes to count, so He made us counters. He likes to measure, so He made us measurers. He likes beautiful things, so He made us beautiful, and He made us beautifiers.

In my life, I want to take baby steps towards God’s masterpiece, but I want my sons and daughters to take bigger steps, maybe even run toward God’s masterpiece. Not because they’re in any hurry, but because the breeze feels so nice on their faces.  I want them to mature and bear fruit, so I’m endeavoring to teach them to recognize beauty when they see it, hear it, taste, smell, and touch it. Then later, perhaps even without measuring they will incorporate proportions in their lives that mirror God’s objective beauty. Godly proportions in their character and service, as well as their artifacts. I want them to recognize beauty even when it looks like this:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…

Here’s my son, Seth, presenting his math memory work, which doubles as his primer in aesthetics:

Here’s some links to help explain the many, many things I left unsaid in this brief post:

http://www.biblicalchristianworldview.net/documents/IncommensuratesFibonacci.pdf

http://www.biblicalchristianworldview.net/documents/ringAesthetics.pdf

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