Tag: George Floyd

Categories
Racism

Believe Your Own Eyes

One step forward, nine steps back.

As any watershed moment in American history seemingly reminds us, with every advance society takes towards progress, that foot path lengthens mid-stride.

Yes, something remarkable did happen today, but now there’s a new shitstorm on the horizon with thousands of tiny fires to extinguish and oh by the way, the sky is definitely falling.

So it was on January 6th, so it is on April 21st.

Nine days before Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd, 20-year-old Daunte Wright’s life ended at the hands of a veteran police officer thanks to her mistaking her service weapon for her Taser.

He died 10 miles down the road from the courthouse where George Floyd’s murderer was convicted.

13 days before Kim Potter murdered Daunte at that traffic stop, approximately 424 miles away in the City of Chicago, Officer Eric Stillman shot and murdered 13-year-old Adam Toledo. According to the Chicago PD, Toledo had a gun on his person the moment Stillman discharged his weapon in the early hours of March 29th. As we learned six days ago when Stillman’s body camera footage of the encounter from 16 days prior was finally released to the general public, this was a lie.

Eric Stillman murdered Adam Toledo in cold blood on camera.

Former Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kim Potter executed Daunte Wright in broad daylight.

Believe your eyes.

If Derek Chauvin taught us anything in those agonizing nine minutes and 29 seconds, it was that you can unequivocally believe your eyes.

In matters of Police vs. We the People, your eyes do not lie.

Ignore them at your own peril.

If this country has any hope of addressing and changing the endemic failures of our system, we as a people must be willing to ensure that the officers who overstep and murder innocent men, women, boys, and girls are tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished.

If not us, then who?

Who will be the guardians of our neighbors, of ourselves?

Who will protect your children and your children’s children when men in uniform violate their social contract with the people they are duty-bound to protect and serve?

It’s painfully obvious to all that for scores of victims and their loved ones, Derek Chauvin’s conviction amounts to too little too late.

Years late and millions of dollars short.

Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and fucking too many for one man to remember will never receive their justice.

The pain their families have endured not only remains, but compounds with the next gross misuse of deadly force, compounding that grief and misery upon a pile of trauma that only evolves.

Quite literally with no justice, there is no peace.

Scores of Black and Brown men, women, and children whose names are lost to time and indifference won’t have their stories shared with a growing, galvanized foundation of Americans beleaguered by this nation’s grimly incessant game of Minority Russian Roulette. All we mere commoners can do is walk the streets with slogans and signs while facing hordes of armored thugs with badges and state-issued licenses to kill. Everyday folks endure this all, put themselves at the risk of suffering violent overzealous policing, just to possibly catch the eyes and tickle the ears of the privileged elite sequestered from reality within Capitol Hill in the hopes that these pampered cretins with exclusive access to universal healthcare MIGHT engage in semantics debates over meaningful reforms till they’re blue (or red) in the face.

Think about that for a minute.

Young 20-somethings, teenagers, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL KIDS will march in the names of the wronged, carrying upon their shoulders a burden not unlike those who picketed for civil rights alongside Dr. King, Reverend Jackson, Minister Malcolm X, and Representative Lewis. And they do this in the vain hope that perhaps, by the slimmest, most negligible margins, the United States Senate will sign long-needed common-sense policing reforms and voting protections into law.

Their reward? Infinite lectures from these distanced observers as high up as the Oval Office to remain calm while the other performative mannequins engage in an insincere kabuki theater, all to allay the fears of an emotionally detached and miserable, intransigent segment of Americans too content with a callous and withered system that’s all but crumpled beneath the weight of its own myth.

2020 kicked a hornets’ nest, rung alarm bells that will not only NOT be un-rung but will remain sounding whenever the next Pamela Turner is gunned down with prejudice.

Evermore diverse crowds shall declare that Black Lives Matter if police continue slaughtering the Tamir Rices and Ma’Kiyah Bryants of the world.

It started long before Emmitt Till or Breonna Taylor, and it will not end thanks to 12 jurors in Minneapolis.

This fight will never end in our lifetime.

So, yes, Derek Chauvin’s conviction should bring us all copious amounts of joyful relief.

But, like in any war, one battle is just that: one battle.

Black lives matter today, tomorrow, and forever.

One conviction won’t do if the necessity for such convictions never ends.

Categories
Racism

Black America Deserves Dignity

It’s a daily struggle finding any words in my personal vocabulary to suitably convey my unrepentant hatred of Donald Jackboot Trump and his gaggle of criminal miscreants, the vilest administration since Reagan.

The “President” continues surpassing his endless diarrheal stream of racism, idiocy, authoritarian rambling, and so on.

Then, he pulled that Juneteenth stunt.

Yes, believe me, I have been EXHAUSTED by this lone year. That’s not even acknowledging the years before 2020. I’ve been mired in daily hatred of this son of a bigoted bastard. But then I saw this video from Kimberly Jones, and she mentioned something I’d never heard about before.

Tulsa.

Over the whole of my time within the public education system, not once did I learn about Black Wall Street, the massacre of an entire district that was A) not Harlem and B) in Oklahoma of all places. I didn’t get the reference. I quickly read the cliff notes version on Wikipedia, and shook my head for the millionth time. Like most white Americans, I learned of yet another tell-tale racist crime against humanity inflicted upon our black brothers and sisters by white mobs that included Klansmen and local police. A crime conveniently left out of History class when such information could have helped a young impressionable and naïve boy understand the racist swamp that sadly is his homeland.

So, when Trump announced that his first Nuremberg Rally since COVID-19 arrived in America would be on Juneteenth AND in Tulsa, I blew a gasket.

I wrote a barely-coherent barrage of obscenities in the Word doc I used as the basis for this piece, and left it untouched for about a week.

During this brief writer’s block, I noticed my cousin sparring with her zombified peers on Facebook. She lives in Nowhere-In-Particular, Wisconsin. Population: Too Many. Average State Ethnicity: Alabaster Dipped in Hellmann’s Finished with a Touch of Aryan Impotence.

I think this should be separate from the White/non-Hispanic designation on the Census. Then the so-called proud whites afraid of being erased out of existence along with General Lee’s many disappearing statues could have their master race they’ve so desperately cried for since forever.

I noticed her getting bogged down by trying to address the suffering of all minorities, Jews included. She meant well, but I reasoned to her that in the scheme of things, Jews have surpassed our people’s wildest dreams on this island continent of chaos we call home.

And we owe our success to Black America.

Kimberly Jones addressed conservatives’ sycophantic obsession and nervous protests over the George Floyd protests and ensuing clashes with the police, completely ignoring the reasons why these uprisings were even happening.

Her words clapped louder than thunder (emphasis mine):

“..the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burning a football hall of fame, about burning a Target?!

You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck.

You broke the contract when, for 400 years, we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth, again, on our own, by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us.

When we built [wealth] in Rosewood, and you slaughtered us.

You broke the contract, so fuck your Target.

Fuck your hall of fame.

Far as I’m concerned, they can burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”

If you’re Jewish and you’ve lived in America your whole life, have you ever felt this type of rage? This weight of destructive oppression? Have you woken up, looked around your home, sat in your car, trailed off at your cubicle feeling, KNOWING, that your neighborhood was owned by Nazis? Your businesses presided over by the descendants of Ramses and the men who pilfered your people’s spirit into the desert sands of Goshen?

Have you passed street signs bearing the names Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Rommel?

When was the last time your kids played rec league baseball at Schutzstaffel Veteranen Memorial Park?

Are you an alumnus of Eva A. P. Braun High?

Do you remember the last time you stood in front of a faded statue of Der Führer?

What’s your earliest memory of seeing that sinister-shaded burnt orange flag boasting the black bars of the Master Race atop the state capitol building?

Or those miniature flags sprouting from Luftwaffe graves, memorializing fallen Stormtroopers from Normandy, Casablanca, Aachen, the Bulge?

Stalingrad?

Better yet, how about that lovely wedding at Auschwitz? Perhaps the Cotillion at Dachau, or that peaceful weekend getaway to Bergen-Belsen?

Remember all of those moments you had to stifle your utter contempt, devoting every cell in your body to prevent you from ripping your own vocal chords to pieces from bellowing at your great-grandparents’ tormentors to burn in the deepest pits of Hell?

Did you grow up under a mythical depiction of heroes from the Third Reich prominently flaunted on the side of a mountain overlooking your family picnic at the park during your brief moment of equality, when you thought only of the PB&J sandwiches your mother packed instead of the disapproving, even fearful gazes from Adolf, Otto or Gustav?

Has there been a night you feared that brownshirts would surround your car, drag you along a dirt country road to a nearby gas chamber, your loved ones screams fading in the dark?  

Be honest with yourself: we have never experienced the level of crushing abuse in this country that the average man and woman of color has dealt with for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Did your bubby and zayde live in domineering fear during the Holocaust? Depending on your family history, they may well have.

Even if that is your case, you didn’t inherit that same fear.

When the war ended, the Nazis were purged.

There were the Nuremberg Trials, Simon Wiesenthal and his hunters, the vast numbers of executions and gutless suicides of SS schweine too cowardly to face their victims in person without the protection of their watchtowers and sheds, the showers or the ovens.

They were ostracized, banned from the Rhineland. Criminalized. Driven to the shadows. De-legitimized. Forced to change tact, return as new versions of their vile old selves.

Here in America, the Confederates were greeted with reconciliatory overtures of peace, brotherhood, acceptance. Just a heated racket amongst family.

An honest moment of brief shame.

Reconstruction was intended to reconstruct the South into a closer version of what America sought to be when the Declaration of Independence announced our intention to leave a clueless king and his brainwashed enablers behind.

But we only rebuilt the same repressive system that facilitated the slave trade in the first place.

Slaves became sharecroppers.

Jim Crow obliterated the newly-gained agency granted to freed men and women.

Segregation divided and weakened the community, consigned them to drug-infested crime-ridden ghettos.

To add more injury to gaping sores, the side that “freed” them upheld that barbaric system of dehumanizing horror and perpetual second-class status in their own metropolises.

All of this suffering, all of this brutalizing, government-backed wars, skull-cracking tyranny, and the goddamn bastards in Congress had the nerve to erect statues of Lee and Davis in the very city both men sought to raze in triumphant Dixie dominance.

Lynching STILL isn’t a federal crime.

Black America, despite white supremacists’ best efforts, managed to not only survive all of this bloodshed, each hate crime, the next massacre and the five ones that always lurked in the shadows, they have damn-near reached prosperous emancipation before cross-burning forces conspired against them. Through it all, they are still standing.

Could we have done the same in Europe?

Thankfully, men like my zayde made sure we never had to find out.

Thanks to Black America, we have America.

It’s their suffering, their pain, their anguish, the blood and tears of their ancestors that made this land of marginalized outcasts and Dreamers possible in the first place.

If they didn’t build it, we would have never come.

Maybe it’s time we as Jews, as proud Americans, as members of this self-destructive species called humanity that we level the playing field for good.

Instead of assimilating into modern-day Kapos, braindead mannequins, or capricious gits, why not live the truest form of tikkun olam and make our world better than it was yesterday?

Black lives matter.

Always.

Categories
Politics

The Real Antifa

The American Cemetery on Omaha Beach in Normandy

Zayde never liked talking about the war.

He never really had much reason to now that I think about it. He made a great life for himself and his family after coming home from Europe. My Zayde (grandfather in Yiddish – “bubby” for grandmother) was the son of a Ukrainian tailor who ran his own dry cleaners and laundromat. Because of financial woes, Zayde willingly dropped out of high school to support the family during the Depression. Despite the rise of Mussolini and Hitler across the Atlantic, he couldn’t enlist until after Pearl Harbor. America stayed out of the war until they had no other choice. I wouldn’t be shocked if he’d have enlisted sooner had the U.S. entered in say 1939. As it was, he joined in 1943, finished basic training, and then left for England. There he and his regiment waited until they were called upon to join the fight.

That was 76 years ago today.

Zayde didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but he came in as part of D-Day plus two. He never gave us specifics, so we don’t know if the bodies were still strewn across the beaches, but I imagine that it was gruesome. I didn’t know much about his role with the Army until I stumbled upon the official copy of his discharge papers buried under mountains of old photos and documents, papers collected over the course of many moves and home office reorganizations. Until recently, I didn’t know the name of his unit or that he worked as a radar operator. Before this significant find, I only knew that he detected land mines, built and destroyed bridges across France and Germany.

He and his regiment spent 10 months trekking through war-torn French towns and villages where, according to him, some locals greeted the Yankees with boiling hot water dumped from the windows of their tattered homes. They pressed on, survived winter in the wilderness, may or may not have fought the Battle of the Bulge, and made it to the New Year. In April 1945, they liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp along with British and Canadian forces. Being the only one in his unit who could speak Yiddish, Zayde interviewed the survivors as well as some of the captured Nazi officers.

Years later when Bubby cooked lamb chops for dinner, Zayde protested and left the room. This little quirk of his continued well into their parenting days with my dad and two aunts. They didn’t really know why their father hated lamb chops. Bubby said he ate them before the war.

We later learned that the smell reminded him too much of the stench from the ovens at Belsen.

He came home with his M1, a Gewehr German rifle and Luger, and a National Labor Day pin presumably lifted from a dead Nazi’s uniform. Bubby forced him to get rid of the M1 and Luger as well as the Gewehr’s bayonet. Zayde pulled the firing pin out of the Gewehr rendering it a now-broken antique tethered by a small rope to keep the wooden frame and steel mechanical parts together.

He did keep the pendant, creepy face and all, with the infamous little Nazi eagle lurking menacingly beneath.

Zayde told my father that he took home these grim mementos to ensure that no-one could say that it never happened – undeniable physical proof of a genocidal regime that unleashed terror upon the world.

I finally understand why he felt the need to keep those souvenirs.

Let’s be clear about one thing: the original anti-fascists were the Allied Forces. They were young Americans in Illinois, Great War veterans from Colchester, Maquis rebels scheming in the safety of the French Alps, Canadians from across the Plains, and Australians of the Outback.

Present-day Antifa is a loose collection of like-minded fascist-hating men and women who protect peaceful protestors from alt-right scum, the violent bastards who want to beat and intimidate society into tolerating the intolerable. They have no intention of engaging in the civil discourse required for a free society to exist. The Proud Boys, Boogaloos, Richard Spencer’s new Hitler Youth. The “All Lives Matter” crowd.

Antifa prevents these shits from menacing peaceful, non-indoctrinated demonstrators. And because of this, Antifa is vilified by self-proclaimed deplorables.

And, naturally, they’re being scapegoated by the men in power who’ve benefitted from the support of such white nationalist neo-Nazis, a scapegoating unnervingly reminiscent of the Third Reich’s old strategy. Why else do you think Jews, communists, Catholics, homosexuals, and other “non-Aryans” ended up in camps?

Then, it was the stab-in-the-back theory. Now, it’s just daily tweets flowing from out of the Oval Office bathroom. Hence why Trump is now calling peaceful protestors “terrorists”, demanding that police “dominate the streets” to re-instill his idea of law and order. He’s even mused on camera about George Floyd’s happiness from the grave over America’s sparkling new jobs report released yesterday.

We’ve been heading this way for awhile now. Hell, as has been documented by no doubt millions of articles, the man began dehumanizing Mexicans on DAY ONE. He has repetitively derogatorily identified his perceived enemies before, during, and after his election, and he’s continuing to slander the opposition probably as we speak. This draft-dodging coward literally represents the antithesis of what it means to be an American, a President, a leader, or even a decent man.

Like all fascists, Donald J. Trump is the true enemy of the people.

My Zayde didn’t go through the trauma of witnessing piles of flesh-covered skeletal corpses as a young Jewish man to secure an authoritarian’s ghastly desire to callously quell peaceful demonstrators he deemed to be “fake protestors” just to take a stone-faced picture with a bible in front of a church to convey some weird strongman tough guy image for his masturbatory death cult. We’re perilously close to becoming the very thing we helped to destroy.

On the anniversary of Operation Overlord, the mission seen as the beginning of the end of fascism in Europe, who would’ve thought we’d be fighting a fascist in the White House? 76 years after D-Day and we’ve arrived to this disgusting moment in history. The battlefield may be here now, but the aim remains the same. Crush the fascists, save the world.

Zayde, I won’t let you down.

Categories
2020 Election Coronavirus Politics

It’s All Part of the Plan

You are now witnessing the beginning of the end.

For four years, the Trump administration has lied about every conceivable thing you could imagine: from the size of the crowd at the inauguration, to the covering-up of bribes/veiled threats to the Ukrainians in search of dirt on Joe Biden, pretending to care about health care while simultaneously attempting to scrap Obamacare in the courts and bring back pre-existing conditions, to making up fake caravans, hordes of angry liberals, tiny child soldiers stealing ballots out of the mail, and refuting recorded-on-tape claims Trump made that COVID-19 was a new Democratic hoax. But perhaps the most devious lies told by this nightmare presidency came in the midst of the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis and cities across the country.

After the “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” controversy, administration officials and surrogates assigned blame to Antifa (anti-fascists) and the “far-left”. Trump named them along with anarchists at Cape Canaveral Saturday morning, and not long after consiglieri William Barr followed suit.

As before, the administration politicizes everything. They never fail to blame the Democrats for just about every negative occurrence befalling the United States right now.

And, as always, all was by design.

The demonstrations in Minneapolis escalated from peaceful resistance to all-out chaos after protestors began smashing windows and setting fires to businesses. Only these “protestors” stood out from the crowd:

https://twitter.com/umnnmmm/status/1266166048958541824

Atlanta saw tensions boil over when more “demonstrators” shattered the CNN Center’s windowed entrance. A city whose last race riot took place over 100 years ago now hosted squad car burnings and rampant lootings.

My gut told me from the jump that something was off. Of course, the Ferguson demonstrations of 2014 and the Baltimore riots of 2015 indeed reflected both cities’ abject rage against the police. Not three days ago, Minneapolis Police’s 3rd Precinct and home of George Floyd’s murderers burned down. Gas stations, retail shops, and various other businesses have been turned into bonfires in Atlanta, New York, and L.A. But unlike these instances, I noticed the instigators of the early days of the riots shared one common trait.

They were all white.

Indulge me as I profile potential criminals in no way dissimilar to the prejudice generations of black people have absorbed and continue to absorb. Just ask Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. But if you look at the looters, the window-smashers, the men and women on the front lines at the beginning of the violence, they’re not black. Sure, black protestors have set fires over the past week, but mostly targets of their oppression. The majority are not seeking destruction. White supremacist fuckholes on the other hand?

You betcha.

Like in 1968, Trump seeks to turn this anger back onto the left. He’s blowing the right dog whistles the way Nixon did. And like Nixon, these snakes will use any tactics they can to undermine and smear the DNC, Joe Biden, etc. They’ll use their fabled “silent majority” rhetoric in hopes that white America will dupe themselves into voting for them once more. And if those moves fail to yield results, they’ll continue a long fascist tradition of staging false flag attacks.

Four weeks after Hitler’s rise to power, the Reichstag caught fire. Nazis immediately squared the blame on a suspected Dutch communist. Shaken by the attack on their government, the German parliament enacted a decree that gave Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich emergency powers, paving the way for the fascist scourge we all know and love.

It worked before. Let’s hope it doesn’t this time around.

Don’t kid yourself: Trump is doing the same thing.

Just yesterday, he angrily screamed at governors to be more “dominating” over protestors, announced his intentions to send in the military to quell demonstrators, and had a crowd peacefully demonstrating in front of the White House gassed and maced so he could take pictures with a bible in front of a church that didn’t want him there.

“I’m your law and order president,” the orange Nazi proclaims.

I’m sure he was dying to say Führer instead.

To recap, Trump’s people have already pre-determined who the “enemy” is, announced that only they are the true patriots safeguarding law and order, and are preparing a shock-and-awe response against citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

America, this isn’t a one-off.

This is your future.

This was the endgame all along. Trump wants to be a god, a supreme leader, El Jefe, the big boss man.

Why do you think he loves him some Kim Jong-un, Vlad Putey-Pute, MBS, and Recep Erdogan?

He aspires to BE these strongmen. He wants to be judge, jury, executioner for LIFE.

Trump intends to bend America to his will, have Congress enact any and all of his lawless schemes, and the judiciary to be his docile, doting lapdog.

The man in the high castle is already here.

It’s just a matter of how far he gets before we’re all shouting Heil Trump.

Categories
Coronavirus Politics

When A Nightmare Comes True

Captured by @kieroncg

In college, I anguished over a future day that riots would hit the streets of Atlanta.

I was mentally preparing myself for the moment that scenes from Ferguson would greet me on Sweet Auburn Ave and Andrew Young International.  

When Occupy Wall Street rose out of the economic crisis, hordes of protesters – mostly children of successful brokers and executives – flooded the streets of New York, railing against the very system that raised their priviliged soap boxes, allowing their denouncing cries against structural financial inequality to reach every corner of the national conscience.

Right at the same time, Troy Davis was scheduled for execution in Georgia. At this particular inflection point, the fires of rebellion and anger engulfed Woodruff Park. In a matter of days, the Occupy Movement re-christened their new home “Troy Davis Park”. Soon, Occupy Atlanta hoisted tents and filled them with disaffected youth, homeless old folks, and bored college students looking to embrace a counterculture. For what felt like three months, the space was theirs. Sadly, Troy Davis was executed, and the tent city fell at the hands of Mayor Kasim Reed’s Atlanta Police. By a small miracle, no one died. No unarmed black men gunned down like dogs near Aderhold. No beatdowns of rebellious 20-somethings on Luckie Street or Peachtree Center Avenue.

Somehow, The City Too Busy To Hate kept the anger to a simmer, but nothing more.

At the height of recent racial tensions of the last decade, I feared the worst. After Trayvon Martin, I prayed that the next death wouldn’t be in my city. When they murdered Mike Brown, I pictured the tear gas and fires overwhelming the Georgia Bookstore just up the block from my freshman dorm on Edgewood. When Walter Scott was shot in the back, I imagined angry protesters fighting police outside the Georgia Dome. After Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, and the countless unarmed black men and women murdered by police, I convinced myself that it would only be a matter of time until the streets of Atlanta would be alight in unbridled rage, indignant defiance against oppressive forces hellbent on maintaining the dynamics of Jim Crow and segregation.

Until I didn’t.

When I began working, I slowly lost that fear. Over time, the next shooting brought up anger, frustration, feelings of grief that things didn’t improve. But ultimately, I was preoccupied with bills and loans and building up my credit. I had to keep my head above water.

Even as the president morphed from a thoughtful black statesman to an incoherent orange zealot, I kept my nose to the grind as best I could.

When I least expected it, the powder keg finally detonated. Hell, I forgot the fucker was there in the first place.

The sight of a burned out APD car and huddled masses smashing up the CNN Center jarred me.

As I watched Keisha Lance Bottoms angrily beg her city to cease and desist, the overflowing lava of pent-up hatred I expected to greet me during college suddenly stared back through a tiny laptop screen. I didn’t smell the tear gas, feel the stinging rubber pellets, wince from the ringing within my ears from flash bangs and sirens.

I stood dumbfounded that the moment I once feared on a near daily basis would happen in my lifetime was actually happening.

George Floyd’s murder feels gratuitous, a needless attestation of the current state of the world: festering, oozing, bloviating while bleeding out in the middle of a society-crippling pandemic and economic shitstorm. We lost 103,000 people to COVID-19 in three months, but now we’re reminded that indeed black lives still don’t matter in America? What is this Nietzsche-concocted sick joke that we’re trudging through?

Is this the true 9th circle of Hell? Was Dante wrong after all this time? Or perhaps Milton’s Pandemonium?

Are we really living in a 1984 that fucked Hitler to bequeth us alt-1985 Biff Tannen?

Is this what South Africans felt under apartheid?

Martin Luther King during the “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” days of the civil rights struggle?

The fires destroying buildings in Minneapolis look eerily like the ones that raged in D.C. following Dr. King’s murder. The final-straw rage and lashing-out of the streets echo 1992 L.A. Within the images of the past week, I see America’s vulgar history re-birthed from the poisoned ashes of past failure.

It feels hopeless.

It feels inevitable.

It feels like it won’t end.

I can pretend to say I have hopes for a brighter day sometime down the line, but I’d rather not patronize you.

That’s the world we live in right now.

Fight for something more.

Categories
Blogs Coronavirus Politics

No Justice, No Peace

When will this scene go away? (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

G-d damn it.

G-d damn all of it.

It’s not enough that the country faces a highly infectious respiratory virus without effective treatments or a vaccine.

It’s not enough that the unemployment figures continue to skyrocket in spite of callous state governors re-opening businesses against all recommendations from infectious disease experts.

It’s not enough to have COVID-19 be an everyday killer within minority communities.

It’s not enough that George Floyd died at the hands of a racist.

It’s not enough that the sack of pompous shit in the Oval Office laughs at American journalists being laid off, or that he accuses a man of murder to the dismay of the alleged murder victim’s widower.

It’s not enough. Any of it. And it’s fucking infuriating beyond belief.

When scores of white people march the streets protesting the tyranny of state governments protecting their communities from being obliterated by the coronavirus, they’re met peacefully by health care workers standing stoically in the face of batshit conspiratorial charges and insanity, and state capitol police officers taking up-close-and-personal vitriol by men with assault rifles without moving so much as an inch.

When unarmed black people protest the unlawful murder of a black man at the hands of the police, as has happened time and again over the past 10 years, they’re shot with rubber bullets and tear gas. They’re forced to not only disperse, but are violently assaulted by the same cabal of murderers that started this whole fucking nightmare.

Meanwhile, senators caught profiting off of insider information are essentially set free before a charge can be laid by the President’s new law firm, the Justice Department. An organization run by a man who openly admitted that the victors can rewrite history to gloss over the acquittal of a friend to the President even after said friend plead guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. A man who believes that the President can apparently do fuck all without so much as facing a congressional committee.

A man who can tweet utter bullshit at will because Twitter is too chickenshit to exercise its right as a private company to consign Orange Hitler’s Twitter account to the same fate as the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

Tara Reade can lie about Joe Biden assaulting her and make him look like a potentially unfit candidate for the White House. Donald Trump can lie about hydroxychloroquine’s super-effective treatment of COVID-19 and receive one little “this is actual fake news” warning label after lying on Twitter for a decade and be given credibility when the press constantly asks if Trump has a point when sharing his crackpot musings because, you know, “objectivity”.

There comes a time when the needs of the many has to outweigh the needs of the few.

In America, the needs of the few have consistently outweighed the needs of everyday citizens seeking the preposterous and antiquated American Dream.

Now, it’s only a question of if this decades-old ailment will kill the country before COVID does.

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