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The offense of the blue-hooded minor

On Tuesday March 28, 2023 I was on the Amtrak train from New York to Huntingdon, PA to give an invited lecture at Penn State. I say the train since there is only one per day going in that direction.

A young Black boy stood before me in the line of the coffee car, to buy a bottle of orange juice. Twice he turned around and eyed me curiously, perhaps because I still wore a mask. It was an intense glance full of innocence, which I deflected because I did not understand it and felt ill-equipped to engage in a conversation.

Later, when I went back to the car for a coffee, I saw him smoking dope on the platform between the cars.  Then, after getting my cup of coffee I sat down at one of those tables in the coffee car.  The head conductor and two of his underlings who were sitting at the other end had taken notice.  “I want to have him off this train,” he told his colleagues.

A lively conversation ensued:

“The young man is unstable.”

“He smoke dope right on the platform behind us.”

“I smelled it.”

“I smelled it too.”

“i can’t believe it!”

“I want to have him off the train.”

The boss of the Amtrak train crew called the authorities using this outdated microwave device, designed at a time when cell phones did not exist, the one that creates hissing noises which seem to come from outer space. “Young tall man,”  he said.  No mention of “Black,” it’s apparently no longer allowed under the rules, because of stereotyping.

But the authorities are ready.

When I arrive in Huntingdon the police is already there:  Two cars, three officers, each engaged in one of those hissing conversations with their HQ.

He is  being handcuffed and guided into one of their cars.  The officers, all white, appear to enjoy the moment of professional engagement in this modest-sized community (about 7000 in the 2010 census).

In their eagerness they have blocked the car of my host, the car I’m sitting in, from getting on the road.  Only after 15 minutes waiting dares my host to ask them to kindly reposition one of their cars to let us out.

The story bothered me greatly, particularly in the context of the anticipated indictment of Donald Trump.  This man had committed multiple crimes, attempted a coup even, and still escaped the legal system.  Here was a minor offender of laws that had become obsolete.  Time seemed to have stood still in this part of the country. What was  his possible offense?

Two days pass and I’m waiting for the train to arrive that brings me back to New York City, a journey that will take 5 1/2 hours for a distance of 258 miles, four times more than a decent 21st century train in Europe, China or Japan.   The waiting room is opened twice a day, for one hour each.

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The Amtrak person, a little white-haired woman who opened the door at 10 am sharp is trying to make everybody comfortable in this tiny space.  Here are the latest newspapers. Here is the latest gossip.  And of course here is the story of the Black teen boy who got picked up by police  a couple of days ago.  In her story he is 20 years old, but she doesn’t know where he smoked the dope, perhaps in the toilet?  In her account he hasn’t been arrested but handcuffed for his own protection (WTF?).

Here I can’t stop myself anymore.  “I was on that train. I don’t understand what the fuss was about.  He smoked the dope on the platform between the cars.  So that’s all he did.  He must have been 16 at the most.”  The Amtrak woman tells me and the little audience around me that, to begin with, minors cannot be on the train, but that she believes this part needs serious change.  So I suppose the charges were three-fold: being a minor on the train, and smoking dope as a minor, and smoking dope on the Amtrak train.  That so many charges can descend on an innocent boy is horrifying, and I’m thinking about the parents awaiting his arrival and instead receiving communications from people that live in a world that is unrecognizable and communicate with these decades-old hissing devices.

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The true criminal

Yes, there are bars already in this audacious Trump advertisement four years ago, foreshadowing his demise.  Depicting him not truthfully with the potbelly he owns and nourishes, but falsely with a chest borrowed from the famous picture showing a masculine Putin on a horse, still before Putin’s mad determination to invade Ukraine.

To hear that Trump, this multiple criminal, gets caught on a hush money case in a district court while he is the clear mastermind behind the attempt of nothing less than a coup on this country is very disturbing.  He should be arraigned every day, for dozens of felonies, for treason, and for crimes he invented that have not even been categorized.

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Nevertheless, a symbolic move has been made, and I’m thrilled that I live to see it, no matter what the outcome is of this particular case.  Others, more weighty ones are waiting.

As in the picture, Trump will go down in a lie.  His very substance is lie; he is lie through and through; there is no genuine truthful fiber in all of his vacuous personality.

He may be the closest to antimatter we have come across.

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