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Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman and Modern Medicine

It turns out that the chances of being born in America - a country of 324,699,276 people as of Friday, September 30, 2016, in a world of 7 billion people is 4.4%. The probability of being born above the poverty line in a first world country are just over 12%. The chances of being born at all are estimated to be one in 400 trillion. 
I walk the empty halls around my room, sipping soda and biting the polish off my nails, and think about the probability of my life. 
I am blessed. - Claudia Turner, Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman
When Claudia Turner visited the doctor on what seemed like a routine pregnancy check, her blood pressure was abnormally high. Like, stroke-level high. Her doctor sent her via helicopter to a hospital in Salt Lake City. She joked about what that journey would have been like 50 years ago. "Neither of you would have survived 50 years ago," her doctor tells her.

I think about this all the dang time. I've certainly written about it a couple of times. There in those posts you'll see a couple of common themes that come up a lot on here: if it weren't for modern technology, me and many of the people I love would maybe be dead, and I wouldn't trade the "good old days" for today under any circumstances.

It's why I root for progress and against anarchy. It's why I'm skeptical about anyone who says what our cities, countries, and world need is for it all to burn down somehow so that we can get a fresh start. It's why I told Susan Sarandon that she can go soak her head when she used her considerable influence to tell Bernie voters not to vote for Hillary Clinton because Donald Trump would bring about the revolution faster.

Well here we are. The revolution everyone's been waiting for. And all I'm seeing right now is proposed cuts for health insurance and The National Cancer Institute, The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease Institute, and the National Institute of Health. Not to mention a 17% cut to the budget of the Center for Disease Control. That's what "the revolution" looks like, Sue. More money for things that kill other people, less for things that save them.

See, when we're talking about burning it all down, we're thinking about government bureaucracy maybe, or political entrenchment, or corrupt politicians running a system that average voters feel increasingly left out of. I get that. That sucks. For sure it sucks. I get just as mad as your average coal worker in Wyoming who complains about big city liberals. The ones who use the electricity that he generates to power the laptops on which they write Facebook posts about how his job should be eliminated because of butterflies or whatever.

Why should I even vote when someone on the other side of the country who doesn't know a thing about my life can cancel it out because they saw a meme about emails? Even better than cancelled out, actually, because they live in a state that actually means something in picking the president while mine is as predictably red as my face gets when a girl says a dirty word. Even if my vote mattered, what then? The people I elect will vote with their party so dependably I might as well have elected a dipping bird desk tchotchke that just pushes a button that says Democrat on it over and over again.

But that's the tricky thing about fire. It burns everything. And in the meantime there are a lot of people waiting at the pharmacist for the pills that keep them alive. And there are a lot of women in hospitals with babies in them who, if given the proper care, will turn out to be adorable and fascinating and beneficial to society. But these same women without the proper care will die.



There is a pretty real scenario that I can't help but shake and it's this one: 14 years ago instead of my wife giving birth to a healthy baby boy who grows up to be smart and interested in everything -- one who isn't the fastest hurdler (by far), but got put on the team because he works harder than anybody, one whose parents are told by every teacher that, while he struggles to turn in his homework, is a joy to have in class because of his unrelenting kindness -- instead of that, she and/or he don't survive the pregnancy. In that scenario I don't get to meet my next two daughters, either. They don't have their mom's beautiful hair. They don't have her love of learning and art. They don't have her "thin, invisible steel."




There is also a scenario in which I do get to meet these amazing children, and enjoy another decade or so of my family, and then in the middle of the night one night I die of a stroke because of my kidney-disease created ultra-high blood pressure or slowly die of kidney failure because I can't afford the treatment, or the prescriptions, or because in the decades past we as a nation decided that public health just wasn't as high a priority as, say, stockpiling tanks nobody wants.

Cemeteries and family histories are filled with these stories. The headstones with angels on them that say just "baby," next to one that says "beloved wife and mother," whose final dates are the same. 35-year-old dads who leave behind widows and kids. I'm willing to bet that if you don't owe your life to some medical breakthrough (like antibiotics), you know someone close to you who does. When we find ourselves putting imaginary political ideologies (the economic miracle of cutting spending AND taxes, the "revolution" brought about by either marches in pink hats or militias meeting in the woods; take your pick) over vulnerable people right now, I get hives that I have to hope go away because I don't know if I can afford another doctor visit.

So there's that. Modern medicine costs a lot in the United States. A lot more than any other developed country. And at the same time we have less help in paying for it than any other developed country. All of that being said, though, it is also amazing. That's what I wanted to say. The doctor who delivered our first baby, who arrived to the delivery room wearing a leather jacket and had so many patients that every time he met Kristin he started out by telling her that she needed to cut back on the ice cream before looking at her chart and saying, "oh yeah, preeclampsia," that guy can have as many mansions as he wants, as far as I'm concerned.

Back to the quote up top, though. When my wife Kristin was diagnosed, she was in a pretty stable place. She got to be home most of the time, with regular checkups. She had me handy, though I am told that I was only sporadically useful as I was A: a very young child-groom and B: extremely squeamish around hospitals, needles, and any and all fluids. She had a mom and mother-in-law always ready to help. For Turner, it was much harder. She spent two months in a hospital, a hospital that was hundreds of miles from any family. Her new husband battled alcoholism and anger issues and spent the time on and off of the wagon, often without a phone, even missing his daughter's birth while on a bender with an old friend. Even then, she's extremely lucky and acknowledges it.
Okay, I'm going through shit and Charley's going through shit, and my shit is very different from his shit. I have to deal with childbirth and he has to deal with being a man which is apparently a lot of work.
At times the forced rest is welcome, other times mind-numbing. She loves her reiki therapist, but her massage therapist talks too much. Some nurses are there just to work, and treat her like a burden (Kristin can tell some good stories about that, too), others are kind and empathetic and great. Many of them, inexplicably, look like Amy Adams. She sees the Wasatch mountains every day through her window, which I often take for granted but from time to time am completely mesmerized by. She is constantly annoyed by people commenting on how huge she is and how she's "about to pop." She bonds with the therapy dog's owner.

But you guys, I've seen Dakota on Instagram and she is so happy and sweet and is always dressed so so cute. Like, what a miracle all of this stuff is, but also, what a shame when you move beyond that "developed" country thing we keep mentioning. 800 women die per year in pregnancy related complications, 99% of which occur in developing countries. The four main causes are bleeding, infection, preeclampsia, and unsafe abortions. We take for granted that most if not all of these are avoided with extremely high success rates, but that's just here.

I once got in an argument with a woman who regularly spent time among some of these societies of indigenous people with little to no contact with the outside world until recently. She was horrified that "western" ideals were invading these previously untouched societies. She fumed that kids were now walking around with headphones. It was important to her that some societies stay the way they are because it's, important, I guess?

And sure, modern life brings with it a lot of dangers: stress, obesity, commercialism, One Direction's idiotic sentiment that knowing that one is beautiful somehow makes one less so. But it also brings some pretty rad outcomes, one of which is babies and women not dying of easily preventable causes. When I brought this up with my unfortunate coworker who has no ability to defend herself in this situation because it's my blog not hers, she said that in those societies, mothers were used to losing children. It was normal to them. I was like, lady, everyone grieves the same. The idea that Western women somehow suffer more when their baby dies is some hot hot garbage. Also, and unrelated, headphones rule and music is awesome so I think they should have that, too.

In summary: having babies is scary, but it can be significantly less scary with access to good health care and an obsession with constant improvement, research, and innovation. We should encourage that and also fight to maintain it. We also need to work hard to ensure that worldwide, women have the same care that we get in developed countries and refugee camps and even poor parts of our own countries. Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman is a fine book filled with keen observations by a woman who is deeply observant and refreshingly honest. And, finally, I need more cute babies in my Instagram feed. HMU.



Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and Scared Dudes


I read Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend in December, 2015. I read The Story of a New Name a year ago yesterday (you guys that post got picked up by the official Elena Ferrante website and I got, like, hundreds of clicks). I just finished the third book in the Neopolitan series: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. One would think that reading one of these books a year would mean that they don't captivate me. That they don't completely consume my soul throughout the time that I read them. That they do not tear me down and reconstruct me into a new person.

One would be incorrect. Each time I've put down one of these books it has been at the end of a period in which I have disappeared from human society for large chunks of time, blinking at sunlight like Tony Stark when he escaped that cavern, craving an American cheeseburger, and a ride in a limo with his best paid pal Jon Favreau. That's me, except that the cavern is Ferrante's Naples, the limo ride is real human contact, and the American cheeseburger is the complete dismantling of the patriarchy.

I just re-watched Iron Man with my kids, because that movie is now almost ten years old and my youngest is nine. She loves the Avengers but lacks that rich historical context. It's like she had very strong opinions about the Israel/Palestine conflict without ever delving into the Battle of Carchamish in 605 BC, in which Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the Kingdom of Judah. Imagine, if you will, happily watching as our friends the Avengers "assemble" without the deep emotional heft brought about by watching our narcissistic friend Tony understand the true meaning of humanity exemplified by his finally deciding to be nice to Pepper Potts.

No, I say as a father and as a human being interested in the future of this planet, this will not stand.

We just watched Thor, too, which for a change is about an unbearably pompous and self-important man who enjoys limitless resource and praise BUT who is humbled to the dust after being betrayed by someone who he had previously trusted. Only by realizing that the world was (barely) bigger than his pecs did he show his worthiness to be rewarded with A) that hammer thing and B) one (1) Natalie Portman.

I started out by saying that's me when I read these. I come out of the other side a more human person; these books bring about character growth. That was my whole reason for bringing them up. But now I think there's another thread worth tugging on here.

Like, why do we enjoy as a general populace the narrative of the swaggering, entitled man as he digs a hole of his own making through womanizing, unearned self-confidence, and inherited wealth and status? That we crave that moment in which he is torn down by his own hubris. Why, we love it so much we put a woefully unfit and incompetent man in the most powerful position in our nation because we thought it would be heartwarming to watch him finally understand the foibles of humanity right before he saves the planet (though only after trillions of dollars worth of spectacular destruction) just in the nick of time.

Ideally in this scenario there is already a profoundly capable woman who already gets it. She's an astrophysicist or an "assistant" who basically runs the company. Or she's Trinity, who already knows all of the crap Neo is supposed to be learning and beats up cops in slow-motion like from minute one. Behind everyone one of these cocky sos-and-sos there's a woman whose whole job is to pass on the knowledge they've spent a lifetime accruing to the "chosen one," who somehow figures it all out in a couple of days. 

Have you seen Edge of Tomorrow AKA Live. Die. Repeat? Of course you haven't, because it failed in the box office. It's awesome, though. Emily Blunt in that movie is, like, the raddest soldier in the whole bug-fightin' army. So of course the PR guy with no combat experience is the one with the special power to save the world. Women in this reality have everything they need to save the world except a magic man that they can coddle and enable until he burrows into his little cocoon to emerge a beautiful, alien killing superhero just in time to save her life because she's captured now I guess?

This is not a new thing that I just noticed. Smarter people than I have identified more examples than I care to list. I just think it's important that as a man I stroll into a space well-trodden by women and add my own special spin to the proceedings. It even has a name: Trinity Syndrome. Just for a minute though think about how many times Hermione saves Ron and Harry's life while being more or less constantly mocked for knowing things, the very things that save the day over and over again. You could call any of those books Hermione Granger and the Two Easily-Threatened By Competence Boy-Children and not change a single other word of the text.

Look at this chart! How do you argue with charts?

Is this a metaphor? Like the only thing women need is a man's gamete in order to create the miracle of life, but now she's stuck with him and so she should also teach him how to be a functional human? Maybe. It's mostly dudes greenlighting, writing, and directing these movies, though. It's my guess that it's something more sinister. Like, we get it, women. You're better in the workplace. You mature faster. You understand human feeling. But there's just nothing like a man when you really need to get that deal done. The only thing you're missing before this company/family/superhero movie really takes off is a little Y chromosome action. What it really translates into is this: DUDES ARE SO SCARED.

Interestingly enough, Dudes Are So Scared would be a pretty fitting title to Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. This is the third in a series of four books that tells the story of Elena Greco. We've watched her grow up in the poor provincial town of Naples, same old breads and goods to sell, I need six eggs, that's too expensive, etc. She and her friend, Lila, are both exceptional. Lila is a legit genius who, for various reasons, dropped out of school at grade 5 and never strayed far from the neighborhood. Elena, on the other hand, while outmatched in brilliance, makes up for it in determination.

Elena at this point is a published author and her book is starting to take off. Like I've said in past Ferrante books, this one is so real. Here's what I said about My Brilliant Friend,
Elena and Lila learn the history of the people in the neighborhood, tracing back the sources of old feuds and tragedy. They witness new ones. There is no point when Ferrante sugar-coats the experience, she never talks down to her characters as children. Never tries to paint an idyllic childhood. It’s just so impressive. Ferrante must have some kind of memory of childhood the rest of us can’t tap into, to view an entire life so clearly.
Ferrante's glimpse into the human mind is still uncanny and unflinching. For example, Elena is like a lot of us, in that what people say about us can have profound impacts. When her book is reviewed poorly, it sends her into depression. When it's reviewed well, she's briefly elated and then immediately focused back on the negatives. Most big time authors and actors will say that they don't listen to critics. They'll say that it's better to create than critique. They'll claim that their movie actually wasn't made for critics anyway. We all know they are lying. We know, because if it were us, we'd be super pissed. That looks sad and pathetic, so most everyone puts on a brave face.

Elena puts on a brave face, too, but we see past her face. Her internal dialogue (a technique I generally dislike) is so believable, pitch-perfect, and raw, that it's impossible not to get caught up in it.
How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?
That sounds like a certain humble blogger who goes through that cycle on a weekly basis. I think this is a good post, I nod, before hitting send. It's definitely a good post, I tell myself as I share it on Facebook. THIS WAS A BAD POST, I tell myself immediately after, fighting an urge to scrub it from the world forever.

*this concludes the portion of the blog post where I inevitably take a book that is about massive institutional and societal issues and make it about me*

I'm burying the lead, though. This series has always been about feminism. About the fear of young girls who catch the eye of older boys and even grown men. About the rigid rules of masculinity. About how even women perpetuate and defend their own bad treatment. In each of these books the absolute fragility of tough guys locked in a prison of their own making is delved into, and the victims are meticulously examined. These men are terrified of women and obsessed with power.

Sweet men become marital rapists and abusers, powerful mobsters become lovesick puppies manipulating dozens in order to impress one, and even well-educated men who claim to espouse equality for all tend to get frightened and attempt to control their wives and girlfriends.
Maybe there's something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was proof that he didn't like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman... I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman.
Man, that's some heavy stuff right there. Elena seizes on this thread. The "great" women of literature written by men are actually stories of strong-willed women who eventually cave in to the man's ideal vision of them. Let's look at Joss Whedon. I have been, for some time, a pretty unapologetic fan of Whedon's, and was suckered into the idea that he was so good because he created these tough female characters. And listen, if you're a woman and super inspired by Buffy or River or whatever, that's awesome. Good for you.

But if you're a dude, I think it's worth thinking about this a little harder. Are Whedon's "strong female characters" realistic women, or are they his own fantasy girls that he creates because he wants to go on dates with them? Clearly there's a type here: women who are tiny, with very small arms, who look like perpetual teenagers but can somehow can punch grown men so hard that they fly across a room. Is he writing realistic, fully-formed characters, or are they a man's concoction of how he would be if he were a woman, and therefore his attempt to "teach" women how to be his kind of strong character.

I don't know, honestly. There's something to be said to have the woman be the one with the magic powers and the men around her acting as support. That being said, at this point I think Whedon has enough influence and pull (and money) that he could happily spend the rest of his career as a producer, hiring amazing women directors and screenwriters so they can tell their own stories from the viewpoint of, let's say, an actual woman. How much more impact could he have if instead of supporting and idolizing imaginary women, he promoted the real ones.
I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.
There's a point in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay where Elena starts being confronted about the "dirty" parts of her book. She feels like she needs to defend this as realism, but an editor of hers says that the only reason anyone cares is because a woman wrote those scenes. He points to much more explicit scenes in books written by male authors. Of course later he gets drunk and makes a pass at her, but this explanation sticks with her.

Later, though, she realizes that the reason this scene resonates with women is not because it's tawdry and exciting. It's because it tells their side of the story. The men's portrayals of sex in literature are various forms of male worship. Women throw themselves at the male characters and always always are satisfied. Ferrante's women rarely do and even more rarely are. Women quietly take Elena aside and tell her how refreshing it is to read something akin to their experience. And of course men are uncomfortable with it. It's too intimidating or scary or read about, or try to understand their partners' side of the experience, so instead they insist on the ignorant assumption that they are doing just fine, and brag about it to their male friends.
Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.
This isn't male-bashing (which, of course, because feminism isn't that either), because the women in these books are also deeply flawed. Elena, because we get to hear her every thought, is often petty and jealous. She quietly wishes death on her best friend. This is a villain trait in most books, but when we're reading there's kind of a nod there, because we think terrible things sometimes too. We scold ourselves and think, what a terrible thought. But that doesn't make it not happen. We'd be horrified if anyone could read them. Most authors wouldn't delve this deep for fear of losing the reader's sympathy. Ferrante doesn't give a crap.
Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.
It's pretty amazing.

I read these books once a year not because I want to put the one down and immediately pick up the next. It's because I know that it will be over soon and I don't want to rush it. These books are special. I won't forget them ever. They're also kind of exhausting. I think that if I read them all back to back it would take away some of their power. Like Cadbury Creme Eggs, one is delicious, two is pushing it, and four leads to a tummy ache and your boy Howie on a sugar rush where I chase my cats around the house while improvising parody songs about them.



Thursday, June 1, 2017

The Hate U Give and a Thing I Realized On My Walk

Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated. - Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
At this point I've read a lot of books about what it's like to be black in America. There are a lot more that I can read, and hopefully I get around to a lot of them by the time this experiment is over (this experiment being my life - hypothesis: if I write a blog every week (mostly) and nobody reads it, will I keep doing it?), but I will never really understand it. Here's an example: In Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give there was a scene that didn't make any sense to me. This is going to take some explaining.

Starr Carter is 16 and after a party is riding in a car with a boy who she'd grown up with, who had been her best friend, but from whom she'd become distant after her parents started sending her to a private school. Khalil, her friend, is pulled over by a police officer and is eventually shot. The details are believable and scary and infuriating, as the real-life shootings this story is based on have been.

Starr becomes the only witness as her community mourns and then protests the shooting. At one point Starr's father, ex-gang member turned grocery store owning pillar of the community, is humiliated at the doorstep of his own business by police officers. He's forced to lie on the ground handcuffed while his young son and teen son and daughter watch and become agitated. He's verbally and physically abused by the officers - one white and one black - and desperately tells his children to calm down, worried that his own teen son would be shot.

All of this so far is the kind of thing I've read in the news dozens of times. One need only skim the Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department to find enough horror stories to fill a dozen books the length of The Hate U Give. And listen, it's kind of a long book.

From the report:
The sergeant who responded to the scene confirmed that the involved officers tased the man twice and hit him in the face with their fists, yet the sergeant’s report of the incident concluded that the “officers showed great restraint and professionalism.”
This was a man who was stopped for no reason, detained without any explanation, and then taken to the hospital.

Another incident, again with no charge, arrest, or any finding of wrongdoing:
The female officer then put on purple latex gloves, pulled up the woman’s shirt and searched around her bra. Finding no weapons or contraband around the woman’s chest, the officer then pulled down the woman’s underwear and searched her anal cavity….The search occurred in full view of the street, although the supervising male officer claimed he “turned away” and did not watch the woman disrobe… Officers conducted this highly invasive search despite lacking any indication that the woman had committed a criminal offense or possessed concealed contraband. (SOURCE)
This is all stuff that we're pretty well versed in at this point. Unless you're going out of your way to avoid this kind of thing because you've already made up your mind, it shouldn't be news to you. Even if somehow the only thing you ever read at all is this blog (if this is true let me bake you a cake and also while it's baking let's have a serious conversation about your life choices), you've been briefed.

Those weren't the scenes that confused me. Because I get it, you all. I am so woke it's weary just to be me sometimes because I just get it so hard. The scene that confused me is when later in the book Starr's family is enjoying the basketball finals and giving each other crap about whether or not Lebron is the GOAT when their house is hit with a drive-by.

Duh, I'm thinking when I read this, because part of Starr's testimony involved a gang leader and he wasn't happy to be identified and of course it's their revenge. But when Starr's uncle (a police officer) arrives, her dad doesn't want the police called, and neither does Starr. Because what if it was the police who did the drive-by?

And then I'm like come on. The police doing a drive-by? That's some gangster sh**. Of course it wasn't those guys. And then I'm like wait a minute. I still think of the police as the good guys because I've never had a personal reason not to. I've said before in previous posts that I know and work with fantastic police officers. The few even remotely antagonistic interactions I've had with them have ended with what was, at the very worst, a kind of expensive ticket that I talked down by half before grumpily paying.

And I still think of the police as mostly good people who do a mostly good job but also it's the kind of job that may attract bullies and give them weaponry and tactics and the tacit admission that almost whatever they do will result in at worst some paid leave as far as their careers are concerned. The job is thankless and scary and dangerous and split-second decision-making often has terrible outcomes and there is a reasonably justifiable argument to make that as a society we should protect the people who are protecting us. 

That's what I grew up with, even with all the books and news I read, because that's my experience. That is not Starr's dad's experience, and Starr watched her best friend get murdered, and then had a gun pointed in her face by a white police officer. Already at 16 she's seen a lot. From her point of view, maybe it was the police officers who shot up her house. That's because she lives in a reality where even a black Republican senator gets pulled over seven times in one year, who also tells the story of a black staffer who traded in his Chrysler 300 because he was pulled over so many times and asked if he'd stolen the car. And that's in nice neighborhoods. The Hate U Give does not take place in a nice neighborhood.
This is exactly what They expect you to do," Momma says.
They with a capital T.
There's Them and then there's Us. Sometimes They look like Us and don't recognize They are Us.
Check this out. In 2006 an FBI report was unclassified (well, some of it was) showing that the Bureau has been investigating the infiltration of law enforcement groups by white supremacists. For exampe, and I quote,
Since coming to law enforcement attention in late 2004, the term "ghost skins" has gained currency among white supremacists to describe those who avoid overt displays of their believfs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes. One Internet posting described this effort as a form of role-playing. In which "to create the character, you must get inside the mind of the person you are trying to duplicate." Such role-playing has application to ad-hoc and organized law enforcement infiltration. At least one white supremacist group has reportedly encouraged ghost skins to seek positions in law enforcement for the capability of alerting skinhead crews of pending investigative action against them. (SOURCE, emphasis added)
Often people will say, "well that's just one bad apple," like that's supposed to mean anything. In actuality that phrase is as ironic as the t-shirt choices of a Brooklyn copy-editor trying to dig change from his skintight black jeans to pay too much for a boba tea. The phrase is "one bad apple SPOILS THE BUNCH." That's because when apples start to over-ripen, they produce ethylene, which in turn causes the other apples to do the same. Also, as mold spreads, it wants new food, and spreads to the other apples. The whole point of that phrase is that if you deal in apples, you actively seek out the bad ones so they don't ruin the rest.

We live in a society where a 38-million gallon reservoir was emptied because a guy peed in it, but a police department that didn't fire an officer for shooting a 12-year-old boy within 2 seconds of his arrival on the scene decided that lying on his resume was a bridge too far. That's like leaving a rotten apple in a barrel for months before deciding to throw it away because the sticker on it was crooked.

We don't know if the cops did the drive-by (I mean, they didn't, because it's fiction), but I bet it wasn't them. I did a quick search and could find no examples of police drive-by shootings, but I did find a ton where the officers were the victims (because again - frickin dangerous, thankless job). I mean, it's not irrational to be jarred by the assumption the characters made in the book because that kind of thing is rare to the point of near nonexistence. But when I read it, I was annoyed, because I felt like it didn't ring true. Only later when I was on a walk did I realize that even if it didn't make factual or statistical sense, it made perfect sense to Starr. That's because she's black, and I'm not.
The truth casts a shadow over the kitchen—people like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time though, that one time when it ends right.
I'm afraid that this book will only be read by people who already think they understand what's going on in our cities, and that the people who it would teach the most will sneer at it like I sneer at whatever American Flag-draped "book" Sean Hannity just came out with. Those folks are going to miss out on what is at its heart the story of a loving family with a great sense of humor and a deep character study of a young girl figuring out her place in the world. They won't see the open eyes with which Thomas portrays the complexity of the neighborhood. They won't fall in love with Starr Carter, and their lives will be poorer for it. 

But even if it's only read by the people who think they get it, maybe they'll end up like me, realize how little we know, and start to think they might never get it. That it's OK to admit that we don't know and will never know what it's like. That's the best place to be, I've found, because then we never stop listening. We become like the Ken Garff billboards all along Utah highways, like we've got big ears and we're so good at listening and oh my gosh while I was looking for examples of these billboards to make my good good point I found this