I had trouble reading Radley Balko’s article on the arrest and trial of Cory Maye. It’s a pretty infuriating article. I picture this young man in his quiet home with his 18-month-old daughter asleep in the other room and I immediately think of myself in my quiet home with my young daughter asleep in the other room. I picture the soft sounds of the day after Christmas, the colorful lights on the porch, the echoes of Christmas carols still lingering in the silence. I see my daughter’s face. And then I imagine this:
They didn’t. They got worse. The commotion moved from the front of his home to the back, closer to Maye, and just outside the door to the room where he and his daughter were lying.
“Thought someone was trying to break in on me and my child,” Maye testified.
“And how were you feeling?” an attorney asked.
“Frightened,” Maye said. “Very frightened.”
One loud, last crash finally flung the rear door wide open, nearly separating it from its hinges. Seconds later, someone kicked open the bedroom door. A figure rushed up the steep, three-step entrance to the house and entered the room. Maye fired into the darkness, squeezing the trigger three times.
Maye says the next thing he remembers is hearing someone scream, “Police! Police! You just shot an officer!” He then dropped his gun, slid it away from his body, and surrendered.
In the end, a good cop was shot and killed, and a good law-abiding citizen was thrown into prison, sentenced to death, and taken from his family, from his young daughter. (Maye is now looking forward to a new trial, thanks largely to reporting by Radley Balko and others.)
I watched the pro school-choice film The Lottery the other day on Netflix (snarkily dismissed by the New York Times here) and had much the same reaction: what if these were my children consigned to these schools, destined to almost certain failure and poverty? What if I didn’t have a choice? What if the future was mapped out in such stark and desolate terms for my children?
Say what you will about school choice, very few of us are in a position of no choice at all. I have oscillated between support and antagonism toward the school-choice movement as a whole, but when it all comes down I’m not staring down the barrel of this particular conundrum. School choice for me and for mine is not a matter of life and death, and yet I have plenty of it, more than enough. There may be things wrong with the school-choice movement, but how can I really critique the notion of school choice? I would be a hypocrite at best.
Because I don’t live in the world these people inhabit.
What if police came to the doors of our friends and families and kicked them down in the dark of night, shot our dogs, and sent our young men to prison? What if our children were imprisoned in failing schools at the mercy of local politicians and powerful teachers’ unions? What if we were POW’s in the War on Drugs, shuffled out of society after militarized drug raids or pernicious three-strikes policies. We’d start to realize that these are the same kids, first abandoned by their schools and then taken away altogether. We might start to realize that we have created a country where events like these have become all too commonplace:
There are dozens more examples.
This isn’t how it works, of course, in middle-class America. For the most part white, middle-class Americans can choose, to some degree, where their children go to school. For the most part white middle-class Americans do not need to worry that the police will come knocking in the middle of the night.
The War on Drugs and the failing education system in inner cities and impoverished neighborhoods across this country are part of the same narrative, a narrative which costs the American taxpayer billions of dollars a year not only in public spending but in lost productivity, and costs young men and women their lives and futures on a daily basis. No other country in the world locks up as many people as America does. Countries far to the left of America have fare more robust school-choice regimes and promote economic mobility in ways Americans ought to be much better at.
Balko quotes Maye at the end of his piece, and it’s a fitting end to any discussion on this subject:
