Politics Corner, June 1st

"Lady Freedom" by skpy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 

You know the news. Let's talk.

It might look nice outside.
Don't be fooled.
Photo mine

There's some sort of incident at City Hall that involves an awful lot of police cars.

From here it's just a bunch of pretty lights and sirens.

Photo mine

ETA: I wrote this in a happier time: this afternoon. I should know better. By now it's likely that we are under a probably illegal and definitely sloppy and dangerous martial law. Like they used to say on TV: be careful out there.

The President is in his bunker and waiting for someone to rescue him. White thugs are on the streets making black people look bad. Cops are swarming everywhere and forgetting all the good stuff they learned and practicing all the bad stuff. It looks like Berlin at the end of WWII out there.

But not by me. Just like the end of WWII, everything is on TV. If there's anything going on at the main Police Station I haven't seen it. Things are going on on the north side (mostly black) and the south side (mostly brown) but downtown, or at least East Town where I am, seems to be immune. Mixed but mostly white.

It was a different world back in 1992. I was young and invincible and I was out there every night. Marching and chanting. My bullhorn got taken off of a stranger I'd lent it to because the police determined that it was illegal. Hmmm, the Jesusmobile that cruised through town with the hateful slogans painted all over it blaring racist and homophobic bullshit through a loudspeaker was legal.

But in 1992 we were going to change things. Rodney King had been beaten by white police and it was caught on tape and the whole world saw it. This was NOT going to be allowed to happen to anyone ever again.

We have made some steps forward since then. We pretended that we erased racism when we elected a black President. Twice! But we promptly elected Trump to undo everything the black guy did. I've been happy to see a couple cops here and there kneel with the protesters but Kaepernick is still a pariah just for kneeling respectfully to acknowledge the victims of racist police brutality. We don't want to know.

And that's the scary part. We don't want to know so we're going to pretend that it was black protesters that broke all those windows and started all those fires and I don't know why those black people are so angry and why are those black people ruining their own neighborhoods and why are those black people stepping on other black people's necks and why do those black people always want something from us?

Rinse and repeat.

Political discussion welcome.