frankendandy

10:29 pm: City Mouse/Country Mouse

Yesterday, I work up a bit worn out and rather aglow from Saturday’s trip to several Vashon Island farms. I went with a small group of people from the Community Alliance for Global Justice’s Food Justice Project. In the spirit of FJP’s aim to promote alternatives to the dominant model of agriculture, we visited three small farms on the island, talking with the farmers as we worked alongside them. We wrapped up the day with a barbeque and potluck at the home of one of our hosts, where visitors and farmers shared our thoughts about the day.

 

It was an exciting trip for me—I haven’t been very involved with CAGJ up to this point, though I’ve long admired the organization’s work. They began in 1999, the same year I moved to Seattle and took part in the WTO protests. I’ve also been quite excited about the prospect of farming and about local food movements, although I have a great deal to learn about both of these. Our day in Vashon was a perfect introduction all around.

 

I grew up in Davis, an agricultural town in the Sacramento Valley of California. I spent much of my youth driving by cornfields and spinach, tomato and strawberry crops. I recognize the smell of alfalfa, and cow manure reminds me of the bike rides I used to take near cattle-grazing pastures. As much as I consider these parts of my childhood, I rarely set foot on a farm in my 18 years in Davis. I never took part in a harvest. I barely paid attention to growing seasons—just the passive cycles of what showed up on my plate. And at that point, in the eighties, those cycles weren’t so different. Local food may not have involved my hands in the dirt, but my mom regularly took me to the farm stand to buy produce, and there was hardly a Saturday Farmers’ Market that I missed.

 

But our locally-produced food also traveled long distances, to ensure Minnesotans got to feast on the same incomparable tomatoes of the Central Valley as we did. For this reason, Davis was the original site of the genetically-modified crop: the infamous FlavrSavr or “MacGregor” tomato. It was developed by a company called Calgene, later to be incorporated Monsanto. Genetic engineering slowed the decay process, so tomatoes could be picked ripe as to last during shipment. It was introduced in 1995, the same year I graduated from high school. I categorically refused to eat them. Not even a decade and a half later, genetic modification is nearly impossible to avoid. In Seattle, it’s far easier than it must be elsewhere, with short travel times from farms, urban farming communities and abundant CSAs. But I realized recently that I hardly give a second thought to whether the food I am consuming is genetically modified or not.

 

I was thinking about growing up near farms in Davis as I worked on Vashon. As I bent over carrots, having a hell of a time picking out the weeds and leaving the flat-leafed carrot-tops, I thought about my proximity and distance to the production systems of my agricultural hometown. It struck me that my primary relationship with the food system came down to two points of contact: my mouth and my (or my parents’) money. My absence from the system was everywhere else: from its cycles of growth, from contact with the work of planting, weeding and harvesting, from exposure to herbicides and pesticides, from the peril of meeting a bottom line in the economic climate of increasing agribusiness. I grew up eating almost nothing but produce grown within a three-mile radius of my house. But all I could tell you about it was how much I paid per pound (assuming I paid attention in my class-privileged youth), and how good it tasted.

 

Saturday, I got a glimpse into the rest of it (minus the pesticides and herbicides, thanks to the fact that all of these were organic farms). After a brief tour of Island Meadow Farm, we started the morning slaughtering chickens. I had been warned a few days before that this was part of our plans, and I was apprehensive and excited. As a meat-eater, I’m vaguely ashamed at my complacency and hypocrisy when it comes to eating meat. I have a hard time killing a fish, and on the rare occasion that I see a farm animal, I mostly want to kiss it. So I braced myself to grapple with the reality of my particular chosen position on the food chain, and to watch, as I never had before, an animal die for the sake of human consumption.

 

It’s a painful experience, the slaughter. Some of this I anticipated: it is a lot of death, a lot of blood. Some of it came as a surprise, although it seems obvious now: the gruesome smell of plucked feathers, the warmth of the carcass, the sounds of the chickens as they are carried by their legs from the coop. Among our group, there was speculation about the chickens’ experience of their death. Did they know what was coming? Did it hurt? How long did it take them to die? Could they see the blood in the bucket underneath them?

 

At once, these speculations felt both too vicious and too vulnerable. If these were the questions we were asking, how on earth could we do this? Why should we? It was easy to see the argument for not eating meat—we don’t need it, killing animals is cruel, and the whole process feels a bit dehumanizing. At the same time, it felt awkwardly intimate and sad to be close to this experience. Before I used a knife to cut the bird’s jugular, I looked into its eye. It feels a bit false or trite, claiming that this proximity made me somehow less cruel or inhumane in my relationship with meat-eating, since it gave me the opportunity to absorb the profoundly disturbing experience of ushering a living being from life into death into food. But it’s why I wanted to do it.

 

There are repercussions, even (perhaps especially) in our politically-engaged communities when it comes to bringing this intimacy to light. Sandor Katz, a food populist, self-proclaimed fermentation fetishist, and community educator recently published a book called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. In it, he describes a pig slaughter on the communal farm on which he lives. His experience of it was emotionally charged and painful. In response this passage, the punk band Propaghandi responded with a song called “Human(e) Meat: The Flensing of Sandor Katz,” in which Katz himself is the fictional subject of slaughter. Todd Kowalski, a member of the band explains the song: “It makes light of the idea of humanely killing animals, and so we kind of just removed the animal, put him in place for satirical reasons, just to show that clearly this isn’t humane.” The point it well taken—it is notable that moral revulsion for killing is highly selective (and sometimes arbitrary, as is called to mind by the bumper sticker about calling some animals pets and other animals food). Nevertheless, in a culture in which queers are routinely beaten and murdered, and bodies with HIV and AIDS are profoundly devalued and marked as toxic, a descriptive scene of Katz’s murder is not in the least bit amusing. And although Propaghandi has never minced words when it comes to their vegan activism, I don’t know of any song in which a particular individual associated with factory meat farming got such vile treatment as did Sandor Katz. It seems that it strikes a nerve quite deeply when we refuse to be numb in the face of killing animals.

 

After the chicken slaughter, we took a quiet walk to Plum Forest Farm, and I considered all of the things about farming that before were too far away from me to notice: its absolute unpredictability (the snowy winter that destroyed a greenhouse with a heavy deposit of ice on its roof), the constant struggle with pests (greens that are lacy with bug-chewed holes, rendering entire rows unmarketable), the challenge of meeting the changing demands of regulatory agencies (how and when meat can be sold based on where it is slaughtered, where it is butchered, and whether the FDA has approved these sites). It seemed remarkable how easily I was able to maintain such oblivion, living for so long in a town full of farms, from what was actually involved in the act of farming.

 

Of course, race and class privilege figured into my insulation. Compared to its neighboring towns, Davis is wealthy and highly educated—more than 60% of adults have college degrees. The median household income is upwards of $70,000—at least $20,000 more than in the neighboring agricultural towns of Winters and Woodland. Davis is also fiercely segregated and wealth-divided, particularly between full-time residents and migrant workers. In my home, my white family’s household income was higher than the median by a good $30,000. According to the wealth gap and the racist labor division, I had no place in the fields. And, according to the same factors, I had access to the best and freshest foods.

 

This is one reason that CAGJ’s work, and in particular the work of the Food Justice Project is so important. Once again, I’m not all that well-versed in all of the writings and principles of the “locavore” or as Rob Smart has coined it, “Pro Food” movements. But from what I’ve encountered so far, many of its proponents frequently seem drastically out-of-touch with the racism and classism inherent in food distribution and food systems. The main complaint of these movements seems to be environmental (true, but disproportionate in who it affects) or based in health outcomes (same deal). However, despite its otherwise fantastic critiques of agribusiness and factory farming, its rhetoric seems to gloss over the socioeconomic barriers to access. Like the critical spotlight that gets shined on “obesity,” the Pro Food movement seems most concerned about “individual choice,” or convincing people, through “entrepreneurial spirit” that good, non-agribusiness food is the right way to go. With the traction that local food movements are currently gaining in the mainstream, this could be a fabulous opportunity to move the conversation from a stupid and misplaced analysis of “laziness” or “lack of willpower” to a much more interesting and productive analysis that gets at the root of the problem: not “individual choices,” but rather historical and systemic social and economic injustice. Of course, we’ve heard this all before—it’s classic meritocracy-babble. But local food movements (at least en masse) seem to be traveling the path of the rugged individualist—usually an easy one for the class-privileged among us—and generally failing to take up the questions of distribution, food security, farm worker justice, affordability, and so on.

Update: My partner, a grad student in nutrition, read this post, and we had a fascinating conversation about what is meant by "local food movements." She provided me with a number of examples that are in contrast with my above assessment of local food movements-- organizations like Community Food Security Coalition, King County Food and Fitness Initiative, and Solid Ground's Lettuce Link (which, for the record, was one I knew about!) that centralize both food security and local food production. In fact, many organizations concerned with food security and fighting poverty have been talking about local foods long before Michael Pollan was all the rage. Interestingly, my partner's understanding of "local food movements" means organizations like these. While I had heard of some of this work, I didn't have a good idea of just how many organizations and agencies take this particular tack. The "local food movements" I think of are those narrated by books and movies, the Omnivore's Dilemmas, King Corns and Supersize Me's. I figured that intersectional work on distribution, production, access, etc. was the exception rather than the rule. It seems possible that the reverse is true. But it's illustrative that the ones with the loudest (and most widely listened-to) voices are those that miss the boat on the topics of lopsided access and distribution, and that instead cling to some notion that 'we just need to convince enough people that Twinkies aren't that delicious, and then we'll all eat locally.'

 

K-Jo Farms was our last visit before dinner. Like the others, it was a great operation—they milk goats, raise pigs, and grow fruits and vegetables. And a bit different from Island Meadow and Plum Forest, as the owners seem to have learned the whole practice flying by the seat of their pants. I was a bit envious of their story: “We were living in Greenlake, in Seattle,” they said, “And Joe wanted some goats so we could have goat milk.” So started the farm. This explanation—a simple map, really—had the effect of removing the mythical and false divide between “farmers” and “the rest of us.” It’s not that grand a leap from garden to farm.

 

During our visit to K-Jo, I noticed myself silently grumbling a bit about my particular assigned task: to help Joe and some of the other visitors throw piles of sticks, branches and mulch into the truck and drive it over to a pile in a corner of their property. There were blackberry brambles everywhere, poking through my gloves and scratching up my arms. I had to drive the truck and it was big and lumbering—I was afraid I’d accidentally run into a fence or lose the top-heavy load en route to the pile. I was pulled out of my grumpiness abruptly when I heard Joe’s expression of thanks. He said, “That would have taken me a week to finish by myself.”

 

At the potluck, we ate food from the farms we visited, and barbequed pork from Sea Breeze Farm, also on Vashon. Going around and talking about our day, we visitors were bursting with the excitement and giddiness of newcomers. We also got to reflect on the difficult parts—the pain of the slaughter, the sad sounds of a newly-weaned goat kid. The farmers and farming interns among us shared their excitement at our enthusiasm, their commitment to the work, the fact that they want people to know that it can be both difficult and wonderful at the same time.

 

We rushed to catch the 10:20 ferry, and twenty minutes later, we were home. Vashon felt extraordinarily far away, with lit skyscrapers suddenly pressed up on the horizon in front of us. But driving down 99, we were of course passing by urban farms, P-patches, backyard and rooftop gardens, chicken coops, windowsill herb gardens. The trip was a gentle reminder that there are billions of ways to be involved in food systems and in food justice, and that getting a bit closer to bona fide farm production is only one way. I look forward to learning more, to finding out about links between food justice and wealth redistribution, to thinking about ways to talk about food, health and extending life that aren’t collapsed into meaningless and blaming conversations about “waistlines.” In short, I look forward to CAGJ and the Food Justice Project’s continued work, and to being involved as a vision for justice and food security is takes shape as a reality.

 

Thanks so much to the organization and all of the organizers, farmers and everyone else who made the trip possible.

12:55 pm: Access to health without a wedding?
There was another anti-Prop 8 march in Seattle this week. It's interesting to me how much the question of health coverage seems to figure into these conversations about marriage. How wonderful would it be in we all had insurance, regardless of our partner's job and the quality of coverage? Wouldn't it be great if health access didn't hinge on a precarious tower of circumstances (access to a job that provides coverage, enough money to afford copays and exclusions, a partner to provide coverage if we don't have it ourselves, etc.) Whatever your position on gay marriage, fighting for universal, single-payer health care providers a direct and non-exclusionary route to get us something that we all need.

I’ve been trying to think of a reasonable analogy for the U.S. health care system. As Barack Obama and others are claiming that it doesn’t make sense to disassemble what we have and start over, I think it’s important to look into the history of how we got here. Even in my own work for single-payer health care, it wasn’t until recently that I realized how we came to employer-based health care in the first place. So just in case you’re in the same boat I was, here’s a brief summary of how we arrived.

During the Depression in 1930’s, Franklin D. Roosevelt made a decision about whether or not to establish universal health care. It is likely that there wasn’t broad-based opposition to this, but the American Medical Association (AMA) was very much against it, and their lobbying efforts threatened the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. In the end, Roosevelt opted against enacting universal health care, paving the way for first nonprofit and then commercial private insurance companies to enter into the business of health.

In 1942, the private insurance industry was still young. But a turning point in its control of the U.S. health system came in the midst of World War II. The National War Labor Board capped employers’ ability to raise workers’ salaries, which evidently had a drastic effect on employers’ abilities to offer incentives to employees. But employers were free to expand worker benefits as an incentive in the place of higher wages, and as a result, many began to offer employer-based health insurance. A variety of federal policies strengthened the connection between health insurance and employers, including a decision that employers could not make drastic changes to health benefits until the expiration of a labor contract. So labor unions developed a keen interest and a stake in employer-based health insurance, too. By 1954, the IRS had made it an even sweeter deal for both employers and workers, deciding not to tax insurance contributions as income to employees.

Harry Truman revisited the “universal health care” question in 1948. He actually expanded Roosevelt’s initial plan (which had involved a tiered system) to include everyone. Again, he had public support, but the AMA again came back full force against “socialized medicine” (sound familiar?). In fact, they launched the most expensive lobbying effort in U.S. history, spending $1.5 million (in 1949!) on red-baiting against universal health care. One of their pamphlets said, "Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life? Lenin thought so. He declared: 'Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.'" For the record and unsurprisingly, nobody could dig up that Lenin quote.

David Blumental wrote a brief history of the whole deal that’s quite worth reading. Much of what’s above is summarized from his article. Let me know if you can’t access it, and I can send you the PDF. He notes that the private insurance market was a huge early victory for the modern conservative vision of privatizing industries that most other industrialized nations take care of through government support. As if 45.7 million uninsured people in the U.S. weren’t enough to make us skeptical.

So, now the red-baiting (or Canadian-baiting) continues, and about 20% of people in the U.S are uninsured. Medical debt is one of the top three reasons why people file for bankruptcy. Even insured people end up in medical bankruptcy because of high copays, deductibles and uncovered treatments. About half of U.S. bankruptcies are due to medical debt. And bankruptcy, of course, only protects the middle class--those with assets to lose. Working-class and poor people, particularly those without access to ever-shrinking state and federal coverage, are likely to be in even more dire and deadly circumstances.

We know what a drag it is, but here are a few numbers to remind us. And now, the Senate Finance Committee led by Max Baucus isn’t even inviting single-payer advocates to be part of the conversation on "reform." (The reformist orientation might of course be part of the problem). Maybe you’ve heard about the health care providers who have gotten themselves arrested trying to throw a voice or two about single-payer in from the audience. And Obama, who was supposedly at some point supportive of a single-payer plan, is saying that single-payer would be a great system if we were starting from scratch, but that employer-based health care is what we’ve got, so we need to make that work. WTF?

I've noticed that when the conversation turns to health care policy, people's eyes glaze over fast. So let me try with this analogy. Let me know if you come up with something better (and less production-oriented)! So, let’s say that health care coverage is a car. Suddenly, there’s a temporary shortage of metal. So everyone’s like, oh no! I guess we’ll have to temporarily use plastic, even though that’s a bad idea for a million reasons. So we start using plastic, and everyone still gets to drive around, albeit more dangerously. Maybe some of the cars melt or shatter when they crash, but everyone’s resting easy that metal will soon be available again. So then, some opportunistic joker invents some special polymer that makes cars break less when they crash. This person gets rich and the car-markers are psyched, too. Cars are more expensive, but oh well, they work better in this temporary metal-less crisis time. Then another opportunistic joker invents a special coating that prevents cars from melting. Same deal. Sooner or later, there’s this whole crew of industries getting rich from the emergency plastic cars. Then, metal is suddenly available again, but at this point, the plastic car industry is used to plastic. The people who do fancy things to make plastic cars work more like metal cars have lots of money to throw around at anyone who wants to outlaw plastic cars. And anyone who wants metal cars back is called a regressive throwback who is out to undermine the good of the world.

Um, OK, so maybe that's a little ham-fisted and capitalism-steeped, but you get the drift. Where we're at is stupid, it's been stupid for ages, and now people are trying to say let's not start over because that would be ridiculous. When of course it would be ridiculous not to.

So—once again...queers seem to have our full attention on this marriage thing, in part so we can get their partners’ insurance (if our partners have insurance, and indeed if we happen to have a partner). And again, what if we all had insurance? Wouldn’t that be sweet? Are any of us queers paying attention to this conversation?

Here’s your chance. Tomorrow, in Seattle, there’s a march in Pratt Park at 12:30. It ends at Westlake. I hope I see at least every queer there who marched against Prop 8. You want to fight conservative interests? This is a great way. You want to reduce the egregious effect of health disparities (and yeah, these affect queers, too-- especially low-income queers and queers of color)? This is a great way. So... I'll see you there.



Pratt Park (20th and Yesler) at 12:30pm, march to Westlake.

See may30march.org for bus info, list of sponsoring organizations and more background about the march.





References:



Blumenthal, D. (July 2006). Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance in the United States — Origins and Implications. NEJM, 355: 82-88.



Fox, Maggie. (Feb. 2, 2005). Half of Bankruptcy Due to Medical Bills-U.S. Study. Reuters.



Thomasson, R. (July 2002). From Sickness to Health: The Twentieth-Century Development of U.S. Health Insurance. Exporations in Economic History. 39(3): 233-253.

11:19 pm: Masquerading as Progress
I felt a pang of loneliness coming back from the anti-Prop 8 march yesterday. On my way over, I was harassed by a van full of Christian fundamentalists with “you are a sinner”-type signs. There were eight dudes in the van, all staring at me, while the guy in the passenger seat talked to me menacingly about Jesus. I made the mistake of responding early on, so they idled while the guy barked at me about my sinful faggotry, well after the light had turned green.

I caught a bus up to Capitol Hill, and on the way, we were waylaid by three speeding police cars, sirens screaming, that blocked the intersection. We all craned our necks to get a look at what was happening, and saw two men of color being arrested by about six cops. One was already seated on the hood of the cop car, handcuffed. The other was backing up slowly, hands on his head, towards a cop with his gun drawn.

I was on my way to the rally, feeling a peculiar mixture of dread and responsibility. After the week’s snowballing queer racism, fueled by questionable statistics and even more questionable and long-standing assumptions about people of color and homophobia, there were concerns about some of the fucked up shit that may occur at the march. A small contingent of queers (most of us on the spectrum of anti-marriage, or at least anti-marriage-as-LGBTQ-priority) decided to march and hand out flyers about racism in queer communities. We made some signs and showed up to the rally in time to listen to Harriet Tubman’s name be invoked repeatedly, to hear numerous white queers talk about being at the “back of the bus,” and to see signs with slogans like “Gay is the New Black,” and “Remember Plessy vs. Ferguson? How quickly we forget!” (one wonders who the “we” is).

The contrast of the blatant and outward racism that has swelled in response to the Prop 8 outcome with the careless co-optation of civil rights language is demoralizing, to say the least. It’s not that we shouldn’t link oppressions—quite the contrary—but from a position of power and racial privilege, it’s particularly nasty for white queers to demand support from other oppressed groups only when it benefits us (and by “us,” I actually mean a privileged few). And to reply to an erroneously perceived refusal of that support with racial slurs. Not to mention, of course, the massive amnesia on the part of many white queers regarding the huge numbers of queer people of color in our communities that make slogans like “Gay is the New Black” totally idiotic.

I grew up in California, and left in 1995. I was still living there when Prop 187 passed, 59% to 41% in favor of restricting people who are undocumented from accessing all public benefits, including public schools and prenatal care. In 1996, the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, or Prop 209, passed 54% to 46%, prohibiting any form of affirmative action (so-called “racism”) in education, public employment or contracting. Washington State, where I live now, followed suit with I-200 in 1998, winning with 58% of the vote. Back in California, and also in 1998, California passed Prop 227, 61% to 39%. Called the “English for Children” initiative, it required public schools to teach in English, dismantling bilingual education programs and building on the anti-immigrant vitriol that propelled Prop 187. During these years, I followed California’s politics, and as a young queer, the LGBTQ movement there. I recall no concerted resistance of the part of queers against any of these racist, classist and oppressive measures. This year, Prop 5, a measure that sought to keep drug users and nonviolent offenders out of jail and into rehabilitation programs, lost by a wide margin. In a glimmer of better news, Prop 6 was also trounced, a measure that required the State increase spending on police, jails and juvenile detention by $365 million. Churches, labor, teachers, Greens and Liberatarians opposed the measure. Visible queer resistance, however, was nowhere to be found.

Mainstream LGBTQ marriage-rights activists point to their support of President-elect Barack Obama as evidence of their anti-racism. “How could you, when we voted for Obama?” the racist response from white queer protesters goes. Ignoring for just a moment the deeply faulty assumption on which that the statement rests, it’s important to note that Obama did not run on a platform of anti-racism. Issues like increased surveillance, more money for jails and police, and less money for public assistance and education, all of which pertain directly to anti-immigrant and racist projects, are consistently ignored by mainstream LGBT communities. However, when it comes to gay marriage, the expectation is that communities of color should show visible and concerted support. And if they don’t show up? Racism, somehow, seems like reasonable punishment.

I go to gay spaces and queer events in search of community, and often I feel like I never really find it. At the rally yesterday, I found myself surrounded by loads of queers—several thousand, according to the news. I felt rather desperately alone. I was excited about the handful of anti-racist signs, people reading flyers, small indications of a less-than-boneheaded analysis of homophobia. However, the depth of it feels insurmountable. There we were, about twenty of us, not even interested in marriage, marching with thousands who seem largely interested in nothing but marriage, making these incremental whispers toward non-disastrousness. Is that the work we hope to do? What will it take to build a broad-based movement, one that doesn’t hinge on an institution that privileges the most privileged among us? What will it take for all of us white queers to show up for something, anything, in numbers more than a handful, for intersectional issues of anti-racism?

I went home, wishing we could talk more about what we mean by marriage. It seems like a shortcut to so many things that make sense—so why are we hung up on the parts that make no sense? Yes, of course we should share health benefits. In fact, we shouldn’t have to share, they should belong to all of us. Yes, of course we should be able to see each other in hospitals and build families and raise kids if we want to. Of course, we should be able to help our partners immigrate or not get deported. The barriers that prevent it and the racist institutions that hold it up shouldn’t exist anyway. So why aren’t these the things we’re talking about?

One of the signs at the rally said “I just want to throw rice on my friends.” I think that’s fine—throw rice on them. Get married if you want, build whatever relationships make sense to you. But our problems stem from too much state involvement in helping the privileged keep their privilege. Gay marriage, legal marriage in general, extends that power. Sure, let’s talk about marriage, let’s talk about nonmonogamy, let’s talk about all the things we do and all of the ways we build relationships and community. But before we get started, let’s commit to getting us all to a point of survival first—because we’re not even there yet, and because we can’t do it alone.

11:16 am: the gut knot
I was at the coffeeshop on Friday and saw a load of ambulances go by. I found out later that they were racing downtown, where someone forced his way into the Jewish Federation office and started shooting. Apparently, he first announced that he is a Muslim American angry with Israel. He shot six women, one of whom died.
I don't know what to do with this. Muslims are terrified of a backlash. Jews are terrified of a reoccurrence. There have been a few moments of love and reflection, but a lot of people are full of awful political commentary-- racist, nationalist, etc. etc. etc.
I'm just left this this terrible knot in my gut. I'm angry at Israel and the U.S. I'm furious at the failure of a lot of Jews to question Irael's militarism and politics of occupation, imprisonment, and institutionalized violence. And I know that anti-Semitism is still alive and well-- it just looks even more complicated.
And I'm still left with this knot. The news is full of psychological evaluations of the shooter-- bipolar, criminal history, acting alone, not really practicing Muslim anyway, etc. Some people find this to be a relief. I find it all to be a horror. Every single thing about this. And the sickest part is that there is even privilege inherent in this kind of violence being an anomaly.