The Lunchbox

The importance of witness.

M. Gessen, discussing Russia’s early incursions into Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s blatant denials of what everyone could plainly see:

It all has that surreal feeling of trying to reason with a bully in a schoolyard who is holding your lunchbox. You say, “Give me my lunchbox.” They say, “I don’t have your lunchbox.” You say, “It’s in your right hand.” They say, “There’s nothing in my right hand.” Then you look around for witnesses because that’s the only way to validate what you’re experiencing. You want someone to whom you can say, “You can see, right, that he’s got my lunchbox in his left hand now?” But there’s nobody there.

Source

This week, America saw a “lunchbox” — a car turning away from a government agent and the arm of that government agent extending into the driver’s side window to fire a weapon at close range into the driver of the vehicle.

And we are being told there is no lunchbox.

We are not the crazy ones.

There is a lunchbox.

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I do not write about current events often, but there are times when I feel conscience-bound to do so. This is one of them. “The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out,” says Gandalf in one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. He is speaking of the great and growing peril of Mordor. Our own Mordor grows. I wish it were otherwise.

“You can’t see me.”