I’m listening to Biggie rapping, overlaid with an alternative song backbeat. It’s not allowed to finish before the next is sampled. Then the next. That 70’s disco beat Blondie with the church bell sounds, a techno beat, and the Doors vocal overlay. All of this in search of the Missy Elliot/Le Tigre smash up that was so absurdly pleasing to me. While I’m trying to write, pushing aside nagging thoughts of the Work work which I’m neglecting, and ever-alert since I’m on-call.

Now Missy & Le Tigre are on, and I’m smiling, but my shoulders still seem to have invisible strings jerking them closer to my ears.

I just read on CNN that the mayor of Jena released a statement that, at long last, “enough is enough”.  He reached this decision after John Mellencamp wrote a song lyric asking Jena to take down its nooses.While the racial incidents have been being investigated by reporters, he says that the citizens of Jena have been accommodating and kind and he had hoped that this would speak for itself, that it would help inform them and us that Jena is being mischaracterized by these incidents. I felt he was saying in my own different words, that the incidents are isolated and they are proceeding as efficiently and justly as due process allows.

He was really convincing.

I wanted to write about the tangent, or my own extrapolation, where help began to hurt. If attention is a lens, there are times when such finite, close focus does begin to mischaracterize that thing. You could spend years memorizing the repetitive pattern, the grid, of cells: you see the cell wall, the nucleus, the mitochondrion, etc. You study this picture, these cells. It is not short-sightedness which prevents you from seeing a tree when studying a slide of the tree bark, that slide and those cells are not a lie about the tree, they’re just nothing from which you can intelligently extrapolate. I went so far as to construe this as another example of a pendular quality I see repeated in life. In this case, where something is going wrong, attention needs to be paid, so change can be made, but if attention continues to be paid in excess, more damage is caused. You swing straight through helpful and maybe the momentum of the correction is what carries you along to increasing the damage. But I see it happen.

That, however, does not seem to be the case with the Jena six. I would like to officially apologize for being so ignorant. I feel sorry for us all, for Jena and for everyone outside of Jena looking in, and wondering what in the hell is the real truth? We can’t know. But isolated incidents seems like a gross mischaracterization or assumption which I made based on the mayor’s statements. It seems to come from both sides, or all sides, that the racial tensions were well know, and this wasn’t just a bad day. Or a bad month. For a time, who knows when it started or what prompted it, it sounds like it would have been really hard to live in Jena. As a white I would have felt like crap, feeling insufficient as one to bridge the gap of race, but desperately wanting to divorce myself from ignorant fucks making nooses – how can it not make me angry?! I absolutely don’t want to judge. What’s clear to me, is that it’s confusing. Is that I wasn’t there. Is that I can never know. But something tells me that there are a lot of people to feel sorry for, and wherever the pendulum is at just now, it either hasn’t arrived at, or just swung right on through, ‘helpful’.

I think Jena could use some help.

And I really wish I know what would help, or who.