General Assembly not built for change
It’s a perfect storm, a perfectly dreadful confluence of disease, death and racist police misconduct that is much more exposed, thankfully, in this age of hand-held devices.
But I’m not sure that even in this moment, much will change. Generations of traumatized minority residents have grown up with violence that no amount of “protesting” in white suburbs will remedy.
You want change? Regionalize Connecticut’s schools. But don’t expect the General Assembly’s help. The 151 House members and 36 senators get nominated to protect their individual towns, not the health and welfare of the entire state.
It’s a rural and suburban-dominated legislature, period.
They’re perfectly fine with their exclusionary three-acre zoning along the Gold Coast and suburban enclaves near the major cities. Don’t call it racist in Fairfield and Milford. Call it a moratorium on affordable housing, engineered by the Connecticut General Assembly.
New Canaan is perfectly willing to allow anyone to live in their town, if you have $2 million to plunk down on a center-hall colonial with an outdated septic, for some poetic aroma.
Yeah, it’s a stinky time to be alive, with black residents of the state 10 times more likely to die from gun violence; with low-wage workers deemed “essential” in the time of COVID; and the general health of urban neighborhoods much more exposed to the virus than those in Ferndale with the luck to telecommute through the last three months.
U.S. Rep. John Larson, U.S. Sens. Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin and Gov. Ned Lamont nailed the moment on Friday.
The scene was the driveway at St. Francis Hospital, which is the trauma center for the west side of Hartford, where the victims of urban disputes — there’s a word — are treated for the massive internal injuries that result from bullet wounds.
It was an annual commemoration and there were maybe 100 people: doctors, hospital staff, mothers who have lost children to violence. Everyone had a mask, although social distancing was out the window. Nearly everyone had an orange ribbon on their clothing or wore a T-shirt of that color. It was Gun Violence Awareness Day.
Larson, a pit bull in the mode of Democrats in Congress up against a do-nothing-but-protect-Trump Senate, saw this historic convergence in 2020 hindsight. Our moment is a combination of the 1918 flu pandemic, the 1929 stock market crash and the political activism of 1968, he said, stressing that it had been 465 days since the U.S.
House approved universal background checks on firearms sales, only to meet the Republican Senate wall.
“This is a public health epidemic,” Murphy said, talking about inner-city kids whose brains develop differently due to the everyday trauma of the streets. “Science tells us kids who grow up in neighborhoods where gun violence is a daily ritual, their brains don’t work the same way (as) kids like me, who grew up just down the street in Wethersfield.”
“We were in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence for years before this pandemic, no less deadly than that insidious virus that is still taking lives, and we need to regard that epidemic of gun violence as a major public health threat,” Blumenthal said. “We ought to be angry at a country that is losing lives to a virus whose magnitude of death could have been diminished, if we believed in science. Yes, it falls disproportionately on people of color. Just like lack of health care, lack of educational opportunity, lack of housing, there is a lot that we need to do in this country.”
“This year alone our police have taken off the streets 93 illegal firearms,” Bronin said. “This spring alone they took off the streets five ghost guns; dozens of high-capacity magazines. Many of those weapons are stolen from suburbs.”
“We know about the health care disparities when it comes to how COVID afflicts people of color much more severely, much more likely to get infected, much more likely to suffer fatal consequences, and it’s the same thing with guns,” Lamont told reporters a few minutes later. “It’s something about the neighborhoods that we have to do a better job of keeping people safe.”
Lamont wants more body cameras on law enforcement.
“Would we have known about George Floyd if it wasn’t for somebody with a camera taking that video and reminding us that this happened and that was not an isolated incident?” Lamont asked. “We’ve got money in this current budget so municipalities can go out if they haven’t done it yet, so they can go out and get body cams. I know the police want to be able to show that they’re doing the right thing.”
I’m not so sure about that. But when suburbanites point at the police during this new age of protest, they should also ask themselves how white is their town?