Choking Dead Dudes

...And the predictable downsides of doing so.

Hunting for handicap guys to hurt? Here’s one!

I’m a Native New Yorker and like the song says, yeah, you must know the score by now. Specifically, getting what others don’t seem to. However since Trump’s gone national with what was previously just a regional way of doing business, external forces have jumped into the arena in order to try to chop and channel some New York stories into those that serve some sort of national political agenda.

But national political agendas aside — for present purposes here we’re talking about the weaponizing of unhoused/mental patients — no 24-year-old Marine with a perm wants to end his day facing charges for murder. And for sure no 30-year-old unhoused Michael Jackson impersonator wants to end his day choked to death by a 24-year-old Marine with a perm.

And yet…it happened.

Dead Black men causally connected to white guys who killed them is not a news story anymore and certainly not the portion of this news story that got my attention at first. What got my attention at first was the language used in a lot of the early stage reportage. Which felt like a challenge, a taunt to me. Because you see the language about what happened that day seems to have been framed by someone who doesn’t ride the subways.

…[T]here are very few crimes being committed on the F-train that would have warranted the death penalty…the dead guy was Black, the guy who made him dead was white, in Murdoch’s America that wasn’t just enough, it was everything that was needed to “restore” order.

And subways, or even just on the streets, amplified by a Fox-led media, is a generalized sense that enough is enough. Though the language around Jordan Neely’s murder by Daniel Perry was marked by a clinical critique of responses to those suffering from mental health challenges, the reality is there are two responses that bookend modern, post-COVID subway experiences, or those in San Francisco’s tented encampments, or LA’s skidrow and those are the decidedly non-Christian “so what?” and “why should I care?”

While it would be wonderful were we all to be conversant in the language of loving concern, the idea that it would be the obligation of every decent citizen to do and be so? Comical. Moreover, how much concern and compassion is enough? Twice a day? Every hour on the hour? We understand that the unhoused are getting a raw deal but the unhoused getting a raw deal is something to be solved well above most of our pay grades.

That being said, and this is coming from a man who chokes people seven days a week and has done so for the better part of the last 12 years: 15 MINUTES?!?!?

“Don’t worry. It’s OK! I do this all the time!”

The speaker was a Brazilian jiu jitsu buddy of mine. He had been sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco when a guy walked in, threw a cup of hot coffee at a barista and fled. The guy? The barista’s ex who had been violating an order of protection. My buddy gave chase and caught the malefactor a block away where a fight now ensued, ending only when Mr. Coffee was choked into unconsciousness. Total elapsed time: five minutes.

The gathered crowd freaked out, thinking/feeling, correctly so, that the applied choke, would lead to the malefactor’s death.

“Stop it! You’re killing him!” And they attempted to pull him off of the coffee tosser.

“Don’t worry. It’s OK! I do this all the time!” was his response and it seemed comically inadequate under the circumstances but was meant to underscore that the bad man would just be put to sleep and not killed. The police showed up. Took the bad guy off to jail, got a statement from my friend, another day on the streets of San Francisco successfully concluded.

Not what happened when Daniel Perry slapped some version of the same choke on the depressed and vocal Jordan Neely. Neely, who had been screaming about being depressed and hungry and thirsty, and hadn’t been quite right since the untimely death of his mother couldn’t have been any deeper in a cry for help.

The “help” he got, certainly not the help he needed, lasted 15 minutes and was marked by nothing but Neely’s exit off the planet.

Subsequent to this it took no longer than 24 hours before the chattering class started calling Perry a vigilante, conjuring up images of Charles Bronson as some urban avenging angel. Twenty-four hours after that Ronald Dion DeSantis, Governor of the Planet of the Apes, er…sorry, Florida, started raising money for Perry’s legal defense and the die was cast.

Never mind that there are very few crimes being committed on the F-train that would have warranted the death penalty, the dead guy was Black, the guy who made him dead was white, in Murdoch’s America that wasn’t just enough, it was everything that was needed to “restore” order.

While I’ve sensed for years now that the homeless issue is being used by both sides of the political spectrum for some ill-defined political gain, incident by incident the gain becomes clearer…

As were the oodles of cash that poured in to guarantee that Perry gets the best defense money could buy, something that was denied the unarmed Neely, but like Kyle Rittenhouse, a now-right wing stalking horse, Perry is headed for a future of being thanked for his service, free drinks, and talking head shots on Fox. For killing Neely.

While I’ve sensed for years now that the homeless issue is being used by both sides of the political spectrum for some ill-defined political gain, incident by incident the gain becomes clearer and it has everything to do with maintenance of a status quo where the death sentence is every sentence if the optics are…wrong?

I’m disinclined to believe that race was at the root of this but it’s hard to not come to that conclusion when there are scant anecdotes of Black marines choking out white unhoused people with mental health challenges that are then lionized by political figures and right-leaning politicians. In the end though the race issue is less of an issue than the fact that as a citizen of this republic Neely deserved more/better, even if I don’t believe it’s our collective responsibility to give it to him.

I do believe if your house is on fire, the fire department should help you put it out though. Not me, or you, but the fire department. And once engaged in putting it out it’d be wonderfully helpful if they also didn’t kill everyone in the house. And if they did kill everyone in the house, that they wouldn’t be praised as heroes for doing so.

“Don’t worry. It’s OK! I do this all the time!”

Yeah. Which is nothing that anyone wants to hear and which is something no one wants to have to say. On this Mother’s Day though my heart goes out to the family of Jordan Neely for the loss of somebody’s baby. And if you’re waiting for me to say “and to the family of Daniel Perry” too, you might be in for a long wait.

Because, you see, I know the score by now.