Head Down, Move Forward

If you're tired of bearing witness to this sort of ongoing bullshit, you have but one option, and it's a horrendously slim chance at best:  vote.

And it's even worse than that, takes more effort:  vote every day, with your wallet as well as your ballot; pay attention to everything, so that you know what and who you're voting for, how people and organizations are interconnected, and frequently in cahoots.

Sounds like work. Even in the best of times, whenever those were, if they ever existed, being a citizen was always intended to be something of a job. To remain literate and engaged and critically thoughtful is an endless process, and in a society that has conditioned itself to be "productive" and "goal-oriented" when it's not also telling you to consume and don't ask too many questions, takes real time and effort and commitment.

It's going to be a steady, determined trudge, if it even gets accomplished at all. There's much more to it than merely getting rid of Trump and flipping the Senate. This will take a decade or maybe a full generation of committed effort, of not getting distracted or drawn into the weeds of sealions and culture warriors. Either you've had enough of this shit, or you haven't.

After the protests are over and people go home, the real work begins. Hopefully they haven't been randomly battered by bored and hostile jackboots seething in their secret police uniforms, just looking for a defenseless hippie to punch, since they don't go after people who can actually defend themselves.

Ask yourself what sort of person maces a sitting teenage girl, and then kicks her in the face, or shoves an elderly cancer patient into a sidewalk, cracking his skull, and just walks on by. Or pepper-sprays people randomly, for nothing more than exercising their rights to peacefully assemble and air their grievances.

Look, if your profession -- which has a lower casualty rate than farmers and roofers -- has you in such an eternal state of fearful over-vigilance, maybe it's time to look at other career options. A good plumber or electrician can make a shitload of money, and never have to worry about the next person they pull over being some MS-13 nothing-to-lose psychopath out of a Law & Order episode. I have a hell of a lot more respect for someone who knows their limitations and changes tack, over someone who doubles down on fear and force and cultural insularity, and takes out their frustrations on people who can't fight back and have no recourse to the law.

We can play the "not all cops / not all protesters" game all day, but only one of those groups gets away routinely with the indiscriminate use of excessive, deadly force on innocent people. Only one of those groups, when caught on video indisputably committing a horrible, violent crime, instantly gets the benefits of a powerful union backing him, and his colleagues across the country violently proclaiming their unwavering support for more damage to the civilians they are supposed to protect and serve. The individuals in one of those groups gets held accountable; the other group, not so much.

Some cities have tried to leaven the violent chaos by posting cutesy videos of their forces, in full riot gear, line dancing with the protesters or some such. In some cases, less than an hour after the performance, they're back to cracking skulls, caging groups of peaceful marchers so they can gas them some more.

Save the dance videos, guys. Just stop hurting harmless people. You keep hearing stories about looters, but there sure don't seem to be any videos of cops gang-tackling or baton-whipping them. It seems to be almost exclusively people trying to speak peacefully and reason with them, before a rubber bullet explodes their eyeball or they get maced or whatever. Takes a real tough guy to beat the shit out someone who can't or won't fight back.

So vote, and don't just blindly vote for Generic Democrat I Think I've Heard Of. Most major cities are run by Democratic mayors and Democratic councils and city officials, and they are clearly all terrified of these militarized vigilante gangs roaming their streets, abusing powerless civilians under the color of misused authoritah.

No, when it comes to city government, you need people who are going to offer two options to the corrupt edifice of urban law enforcement -- repair or replace. No more urban-warfare toys from the Army. No more "training" like you're going into the IDF to patrol the Gaza Strip. No more winking at associations with white-power or insurrectionist groups. No more "qualified immunity" bullshit. No more civil asset forfeiture giving law enforcement agencies a vested interest in busting certain entities. No more quietly brushing under the rug the myriad abuses that never quite make the national radar.

If there's one thing about the protests that I might mildly quibble with, it's the idea that this is all about racism. Certainly racism is a significant component of this, but the Minneapolis Police Department has had this problem for a while. But the cop that murdered Philando Castile was Latino. The cop that murdered Justine Damond -- a pretty white woman! -- was Somali.

Remember the murder of poor Daniel Shaver, made to crawl and beg for his life before a gutless piece of shit perforated him anyway? White cop, white victim, bullshit trial, full acquittal and the motherfucker had the gall to collect disability because he was traumatized by the act of unnecessarily humiliating and murdering an innocent man in a hotel hallway. So now that cop -- who even now is only thirty years old -- got "medically retired" with a pension of $2,500/month. You think the video of George Floyd's murder is tough to watch (and it is), go back and watch the video of Daniel Shaver's murder.

(I'd actually like to give Philip Brailsford the benefit of the doubt on the PTSD thing. I hope he is haunted terribly by the memory of what he did to Daniel Shaver that night. It would be the merest sliver of justice if, on a nightly basis, Brailsford had to fight for decent sleep, only to have his slumber intruded by the smoky tendrils of a hazy memory of that hallway, he and his partner screaming contradictory, impossible commands at a terrified, sobbing man who was just blowing off some steam after work and minding his own fucking business, before killing him for no goddamned reason other than to prove that they could. Whether Brailsford lives another five or fifty or a hundred years, hopefully every night's attempt at rest is interrupted and punctuated by that memory. He deserves at least that much.)

The point is this -- we should have been having this discussion a long time ago. It should not have taken an indisputably incriminating video taken by a frightened seventeen-year-old girl to get people talking about what we all already knew. I am not in the "abolish cops" camp; I know too many of them who are and have been good and decent people who genuinely want to help their communities and keep people safe. They do exist. Collections of anecdata are not dispositive evidence, but it's not nothing, either. I don't want to punish good people in the process of punishing bad people.

But now is the time for that majority of good cops to find ways to step up and be part of getting rid of the bastards and assholes who make them all look bad by association. If they choose not to, they may not like the outcome that a distressed, dispossessed, disempowered populace decides for them. Your little friendly-stormtrooper dance videos do not offset all the broken necks and broken lives over the years, and the nameless, identity-free prison screws and "bortac" hard-asses currently "guarding" the nation's monuments and the "bunker baby" chief executive, a cheap dime-store Ceausescu whose biggest fear has always been being held accountable for who and what he's been his entire life.

Just stop hurting the harmless, and start holding each other accountable for doing that. Those two things alone would resolve about eighty percent of this.