Wild Animal Encounters Part 3: Reflections on Kindness and Risk

A couple of weeks ago on an unseasonably warm Thursday morning, a trio of these mule deer showed up in my garden. They wandered off before I could get a picture, but came back with six friends during the afternoon rush hour, maybe not a safe time for a herd of deer to be on Broadway.  I followed them when they crossed into a neighbor's front yard.  For a minute it seemed they might wander off to the north and east, which seemed a safer direction. But then they decided to come back to the driveway, close to the speeding cars and trucks. So, maybe because I didn't want to see any of my fellow mammals hurt (either these furry ones or the ones driving by), I walked out onto Broadway with my hand up. Southbound and northbound traffic, all 4 lanes of it, stopped. To my surprise, all the deer but one followed; maybe they'd wanted to graze at North Boulder Park, 3 blocks west, anyway. I motioned to the lone straggler, a male, and yelled "Come on."  He did, and crossed safely.  A BMW driver gave me a thumbs-up, and traffic flow resumed.

Why am I telling this story?  Because what might have seemed like a foolish action to others seemed like the only thing to do. I didn't want to witness an accident, and it seemed like simple kindness to prevent one.  Maybe my six years of Saturdays volunteering in the vet clinic at the local Humane Society* came into play. There was some risk involved, but it seemed worth it.  On the subject of kindness and risk, it would seem that in everyday human interactions, kindness should not be punished, but it recently was, in Minneapolis.  On January 24 in that city, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse employed by the Veterans Administration, was filming a demonstration against Operation Metro Surge on his phone when he went to the aid of a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by ICE* agents.  When he attempted to shield her with his own body, he was pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground by ICE agents, who fired at least 10 shots at close range, with 6 shots fired after Mr. Pretti's body had gone motionless.  His last words to the woman he'd tried to protect were, "Are you okay?"  As they had following the ICE killing of Renée Good on January 7, federal officials refused access to the crime scene by Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  In the case of Ms. Good's shooting by an ICE agent, a medical doctor offering to aid the victim was ordered to stand back by the shooter. Minnesota authorities recently sued, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the Dept. of Homeland Security "from destroying or altering evidence." 

Gauging public sentiment by the number who'd written Congress demanding independent investigations, attending street demonstrations, and organizing memorials, the ICE attacks seem to have struck a nerve that previous scandals have not, with outrage amplified by multiple videos depicting two crime stories completely at odds with ICE or DHS explanations.  Today, there were memorial bike rides organized in around 250 towns and cities around the world, including this one that began in Boulder... 

We started in North Boulder Park with a group of over 760* cyclists of all ages, and rode eastward across town to Carpenter Park, with local police and volunteers directing traffic, often to the sounds of honks by approving motorists.  By the time we'd circled west again along Boulder Creek to the Central Park Bandshell, the crowd greeting us seemed to number well into 4 figures.  A poster we noticed read, "Whenever cruelty becomes normal, compassion becomes radical."

*Footnotes:  

Our local Humane Society is the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, providing adoption services, offering classes, training volunteers and accepting donations at 2323 55th Street, Boulder, CO 80301, tel. 303-442-4030, and at their website: boulderhumane.org. 

ICE is a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The initial estimate of participating cyclists was provided by volunteers posted at the exit from North Boulder Park, and is likely an undercount of the final total, because there were many cyclists behind our group.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Film Review: "State of Siege" --- Past Becomes Prelude

It's 1972, and Costa-Gavras, director of the political thriller "Z", has taken us to an unidentified Latin American country, with the first scene focused on this parked '48 Cadillac Series 62 convertible...  

Soon enough, one of the police cars in the background will circle around to this old Caddy, and an officer will discover the body behind the front seat.  It belongs to Philip Michael Santore, who had claimed to work for USAID in the country, which the Montevideo license plate tells us is supposed to be Uruguay.  The story is largely told by flashbacks telling us how we got here.  Before police find the body, though, we see armed squads of them stopping traffic and searching cars. It turns out that Santore was the last of 3 kidnapped officials whose fate and whereabouts were unknown.

In the flashbacks, we see the Tupamaros, a revolutionary group, kidnap 3 individuals.  Below, we see the moment they capture Santore, with his chauffeured green Chevy Nova trapped between a van and Peugeot, behind a Dodge Dart and Fiat 600, with another car behind. It turns out that the drivers of all these cars are involved in the abduction...

Santore, played with cool reserve by French actor Yves Montand, faces interrogations in a newspaper-lined cell hidden behind a secret door in a garage.  Over the course of several sessions, the masked interrogators reveal convincing evidence that Santore is not who he claims to be, and that he has been routinely advising the police on using torture to extract confessions.  Even after these revelations, Santore projects a calm attitude when answering questions, never raising his voice...

Here, another US envoy is about to be kidnapped in what appears to be his usual ride, a '64 Olds Jetstar I...

Below, Tupamaro "carpet cleaners" transfer the Brazilian Consul wrapped in a rug into another wagon from their red and white 1955 Chevy Nomad; whatever else you could say about them, the Tupamaros had good taste in cars to commandeer.  By 1972, a fascist military dictatorship was 8 years into its nearly 21-year rule in Brazil, and the Tupamaros regarded that government as an enemy.  By 1969, Tupamaros had shifted their tactics from symbolic protests and robbing banks (like John Dillinger, because that's where the money was) to even more brazen tactics, including kidnapping.  

In a later sequence, kidnappers driving a van get nervous about nearby police cars, and take a sudden detour to dump their other American captive, a less-valuable prize than Santore.  This scene has comic aspects, as we see the guy with the briefcase decide to ignore the squirming, blanket-wrapped captive in real time.  The scene seems a metaphor for the human capacity for denial...

The students at a local university are not in denial, however.  They can see the bad economy caused by rampant inflation, and attempts by an increasingly authoritarian government to censor speech and the press, all features of life in early 70s Uruguay.  In another comic scene, the police raid the campus while the students broadcast protest songs. The police run from one end of the quadrangle to another in their hapless attempts to find all the speakers...

Costa-Gavras dramatizes the slide from democracy to something much less by having perceptive and outspoken journalist Carlos Ducas (played by German actor O.E. Hasse) attend press conferences and a legislative session, where representatives argue, seemingly without fear of expressing divergent views.  At a press conference, a government spokesman asserts that the declared state of emergency (or "state of siege") has been extended 2 years beyond its authorization because the protests, strikes and kidnappings are "intolerable for the country." But Ducas (in brown tie on the right) bravely replies that something else is intolerable...

He seems aware of what's going on below the surface.  By the early Seventies, the police and government operatives were involved in extrajudicial killings, and Costa-Gavras dramatizes actual examples.  In the case of the abduction below, the death squad members don't bother to mask themselves (unlike the KKK a decade earlier in the US) because they are minions of the government, operating with impunity as anything like the rule of law collapses.  The agents drive their ubiquitous VW to their young victim's house, collect him from his stunned mother, and bring him to the beach, where they beat him and shoot him dead.

In the end, the Tupamaros decide to take more extreme measures of their own. After government agents round up key members of their movement, the president decides not to release political prisoners in exchange for Santore, and in a suspenseful set of votes that take place on a city bus and inside this green Caddy, the dissidents decide to kill him.  It seems that for once, Santore is right when he tells his captors that killing him would be a sign of cruelty and political powerlessness, but that deciding not to kill him would be a sign of weakness...that is, powerlessness.  In the real world events on which this story is based, when a US agent who had taught Uruguayan police torture techniques was killed by revolutionaries in 1970, the country spiraled into a cycle of repression, resulting in a 1973 military coup and followed by a dictatorship that lasted nearly a dozen years, and presaged the US-supported Pinochet coup in Chile by 2 months.  Ironically, Chile was where Costa-Gavras filmed "State of Siege", in what turned out the be the last full year of democratic government under President Salvador Allende.

Photo Credits:  All images are from "State of Siege", copyright 1972 by Valoria Films (France) and Constantin Films (Germany).