riot and revolution
So, I didn’t feel overly qualified to comment too much on race relations because I don’t have any problems with any races yet cannot claim I am not pretty privileged in terms of who I am and what I look like. Yeah, I have been called white bitch by a few black girls, yeah those instances were certainly rare but happened–I would never claim the US is not largely racist because I see what people say and how they react. I want us to not be this way, but that’s not something you can just wish that way.
I do think we have several layers of issues in modern society above and beyond racism but everything deserves its moment and chance to change society at large, but as far as solutions are concerned, we are not focused on that. Right now it’s been an incredible evolution to what the fuck was that we saw that man do with his boot on the neck of that that man on the ground to let’s torch and rob it all because everyone is pretty poor right now. The irony is realizing some of this looting is due to the abject failure of our government to protect its citizens which would have protected commerce. If we had our crap together, we would have been in front of the virus instead of 3 steps behind it as we currently are. But some of these people I am seeing are feeling that hopelessness that the economy has presented itself coupled with outrage of seeing our police murder the citizens they signed up to protect.
Clearly they have to have legitimate protesting coupled with illegitimate robbing and looting–but there are messages in each we need to pay attention to right now. One, we need real criminal justice reform. The kind of reform which would result in more severe punishment for people who are supposed to uphold law and order and be the example we are all supposed to follow. Too often there has been favor extended towards protecting the people who are supposed to be the enforcers of law and order breaking it because what is it, you get to break it if you spend a lot of time enforcing it. A banking system that clearly has left all of us bankrupt and it’s beyond time to change strategies. Right now I think an automatic triple sentence for anyone convicted of breaking the law in coordination with their job providing law enforcement and protection to the communities they serve. That is one solution.
The other solution would be a new area of government responsible for enacting new police training and reform. We should use some experts from Europe who still seem to be able to disable people who have knives without shooting them, something our cops are not trained to do. We need to re-align the concept of law enforcement to peace enforcement, and the belief that all people they encounter are enemy combatants. Perhaps a rethinking of employing veterans who saw combat as these officers, as largely I think that is a problem. This office would also be responsible for new sensitivity and cultural training so they could understand cultural cues and even how to recognize the mentally ill or disabled better. It would also be responsible for fielding complaints it would need to investigate of police abuses, though my first plan of 3 times the normal sentence for hurting or robbing someone and maybe life in prison for anyone convicted of killing someone with malice or intent, well, maybe then we might have better behavior. I know some people might express outrage over such a suggestion to which I would respond the common protest point and click response–if you have nothing to hide, you’re fine, right? If you are a good cop, nothing to worry about, right? Right.
As far as the looting goes–watch out world–once unemployment runs out, things could get pretty nasty–especially since that’s going to be October for a lot of people and we aren’t grown up enough here to do the right thing and will be in the second, third or fourth wave of this virus by then. These people doing this now are just giving us a preview of coming attractions once we realize the economy is not going to just let up and turn around because we wish it to be so. One solution might be to freeze all payments including interest, from student loans to mortgages for a period of time and add the payments on to the end of the normal term—the people hurting the most then would be the banks, so not sure we have it in our national conscience to do that–but the looting issue now will be hell come Christmas.
Larger cures for the realizations of racism in this country might be harder to come by, but I do think ridding the scorn behind ideas of cultural appropriation would do more good than constantly berating people of other cultures from adopting other cultures simply because they did not suffer through the original scorn behind not understanding people have their own cultures and traditions and there is no right and wrong way. In order to gain traction for other cultures to express themselves, appropriating and copying and modifying these elements I think should be encouraged rather than discouraged, but there is nothing that annoys me more than accusations of cultural appropriation when we all live in the US culture here, which means just about anything and everything goes if you aren’t hurting someone else. Wearing box braids or calling something a kimono is something we should be beyond developing outrage over–but one thing you can be assured of in modern culture is pointing out aspects where people feel victimized is far more common an action than the numbers of people who are actually victimized. Are we all victims? Some are–I guess I have felt so to the whims of my own evil body or health, but not of society though I know there is privilege in being just an average 40 something now.
I have a ton of editorial comments I write often yet rarely share them here because this is supposed to be heart stuff so didn’t want to annoy you all–but, we all need to talk about some solutions now that we know this shit isn’t going to just get wished away.
