This outrage is validated in our halls of power and our media as one of many equal competing perspectives, which means that instead of serving as a shocking revelation of collective cultural inhumanity toward one another, it becomes a debate instead—a *controversial* debate.

So, to repeat: Jordan Neely was a person, a human, and his death was tragic because he had the same measure of humanity as his killer, or you, or me, and observing these facts is one side of a controversy.

Also controversial is any attempt to establish the humanity of anyone who our society has marginalized, which is a word that means “this human’s humanity has been systematically ignored.”

To briefly change the subject somewhat, I’ve been told that I ought to make more of an effort to understand other points of view and perspectives.

That’s interesting, because I am not unhoused or marginalized, so I thought that this is what I was already trying to do.

However, "understanding the perspectives of unhoused or otherwise marginalized people" isn't what is meant.

What’s meant is that I should try to understand the perspectives of others, who refuse to understand any perspectives other than their own.

Sexual abuse is a crime, and it is the habitual practice of the former president, according to none other than him, for which (along with defamation) a civil jury had just found him liable.

And he also tried to murder Congress and overthrow democracy in the United States.

And he is guilty of many other crimes as well, some of which we watched him do and brag about, others of which we must only presume. And he once took out a full page ad in New York newspapers calling for the execution of some Black kids for a crime they didn’t commit, and so on.

When pressed about doing this years later, he pointed out that there is still disagreement on the matter.

So there's another controversy for you: whether those kids, who killed nobody, killed anybody.

Anyway, mere hours after being found liable to the tune of $5 million for defamation and sexual abuse, the former president and lifetime criminal was given a town hall by CNN, and he immediately proceeded to defame the victim of his sexual abuse.

And his crowd of supporters that CNN picked to clap and cheer everything he said clapped and cheered, which only seems possible if they don’t consider E. Jean Carroll to be a person.

This is the sort of behavior American conservatives really seem to love.

And I’m told by Anderson Cooper that this represents an important perspective for us to listen to and understand.

So I’m going to do that now.

I’m told that Jordan Neely was scary.

And I’m sure sometimes unhoused people are unnerving, even scary, and sometimes do pose a threat, maybe even one requiring self-defense.

Desperation makes people desperate, is something I’ve sometimes noticed.

And I’m often scornfully asked if I would like to share a train car with a desperate person who is behaving aggressively and shouting in a threatening manner.

And I must confess to you: no, that does not sound like fun.

Being the desperate person sounds like less fun, though.

I might make the point that it seems to that it is a chronic and society-deep desperation that seems the problem most in need of a solution, not the people experiencing desperation … but I’m trying to understand different perspectives, so let’s focus on the scariness.

That Jordan Neely was scary would be a hard thing to disprove. All you have to do in order to be scary is to scare somebody, and all that has to happen for you to scare a person is for that person to be scared.

And people are scared of a lot of things these days, and more and more of them think being scared justifies immediately and summarily killing the thing that scares you—and I say “thing” purposefully.

Nobody making this argument seems to be thinking of Jordan Neely as a person.

With each extrajudicial killing of each marginalized person I’ve noticed an unusual rhetorical project immediately begins, in traditional and social media, in conversation, and in people’s internal structures of belief.

The project involves convicting the victim with a crime.

It's crime that retroactively convicts them of some crime worthy of death, some crime that makes them the perpetrator of their own killing.

This can be any crime at all.

These crimes are usually presented with a sort of rhetorical flourish, a self-evident finishing move against any attempt to establish the killing as tragedy, an obvious proof that justifies the killing and requires no further embellishment.

Again, this can be any crime at all.

In fact, it usually isn’t even a crime.

Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie, in case you didn't know.

Jordan Neely didn’t have a hoodie, but he did have a jacket, which he threw on the ground. So that’s something we can learn by considering other perspectives: upper body wear is apparently terrifying.

And Neely was scary, which we know, because *people* were scared—a categorization that tacitly omits Neely, the only person who didn’t leave the train alive, which makes Neely the person on that train with the most credible claim to fear … as long as you consider Jordan Neely a person, that is.

But that won’t do, because if he could have been scared, too, then he would have been justified in killing people on the subway car, too—at least as justified in killing the man who killed him as the man who killed him was in killing him.

But self-defense is for people, and what makes a marginalized person marginalized in the first place is that they are not considered a person.

Jordan Neely can never defend himself. He can only be the thing people defend themselves from.

Jordan Neely can never feel threatened, even though he was tired, even though he was hungry, even though he had nowhere to live, even though he was the one about to be killed.

Jordan Neely can only be a threat—a threat to *people.*

Jordan Neely can never be scared. He can only be scary.

Being scared is for *people.*