Care

Readers:

Madame persuaded me that I should not interrupt the series, and offered to forego her posting for another week.

It has occurred to many that perhaps it is more than haughty, untouchable arrogance on the part of the police and prosecution that all of these killings of unarmed people and lack of indictments are occurring.

That it is almost like the system WANTS to provoke to the point where an indignant rage reaches the level of some significant violence or destruction, and then the system will have the excuse to crush all—protesters and rioters and resisters alike—by force in a brutal counterreaction.

To send the message that resistance is futile.

After all, the coroner said in the official autopsy of Eric Garner that it was a homicide.  Note: not “accidental death” or “complications from physical ailments worsened by physical restraint.”  Cruelly executed by the state, without trial, while he pleaded in vain for mercy.   And once again, despite indisputable video evidence, an unelected secret tribunal—really just an extension of the complicit prosecutor—chillingly said that those who selectively enforce the law can do no wrong, and are above any law, even murder. 

The Berkeley protesters over Eric Garner’s death—note, protesters, not rioters—were roughed up nearly as bad as the Occupy protesters were there.  Citizens’constitutional rights to assembly and protest and to petition their government seem a barely tolerated irritation to the police in that once tolerant place, and in many places.

The infrastructure—by design or not—for a police state was put in place by the Bush administration following 9/11, amid the fearful clamoring for “security.”  That infrastructure has barely been even cosmetically changed by the Obama administration.

Police and national guard orders for deployments in force regularly refer to US citizens, potential rioters one presumes, not as potential troublemakers or potential lawbreakers, but as “the enemy.”  

And Edward Snowden and the reporters who talked with him revealed—among many disturbing things—that at least 1.2 million American citizens are on a government watch list.

And the release yesterday of the Senate report on CIA abuses and torture and resulting policies—all done in our name—during the Bush administration had information so revolting it shocked even many of the jaded in Washington.  It is quite apparent that knowledge and responsibility for it were at the very highest levels. 

Yet it is a virtual certainty that next to no one—perhaps no one at all—will be prosecuted for what we once considered—when moral character and adhering to our own laws and codes meant something—heinous war crimes.

Is this what the failure of—no, the disappearance of—democracy looks like?  Is this the nation we want to be?

The tools of repression would seem to be unveiling before our very eyes.  Hedges once again lays bare the awful, raw, and agonizing picture:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_society_of_captives_20141207

If there is not enough resistance to police-state behavior now, when there is still the power to resist, a day will come when effective resistance is no longer possible without MASSIVE suffering.

Martin Luther King said that injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere.  Something to remember when thinking that injustices to African-Americans don’t affect you, that at least you and yours will be “safe.”  There’s also a poignant reminder to all of us from another great African-American:

“If they take one of us in the morning, they’ll come for the rest of us in the night,” James Baldwin said.  And Martin Niemoller would desperately add and remind us if he were still here that if you think they can take any “group” without them eventually coming for you, you are monstrously, tragically, delusional.

As we gaze through the illusions, and look at all the sleepwalkers around us, I can’t help thinking: If Americans feel they are overwhelmed with everything now, what will it be like as the country continues to transform in such terrible and ugly ways?  At what point did Romans start to wonder about the same things?  At what point did the Germans?

For in all this there is a warning to willfully ignorant white America:  The tyranny that you fear will probably not materialize. The one that you do not fear—indeed, choose not to even see—will be the one that enslaves you.

Unless you start to care—about what happens to every group of people, including the one with more melanin than you.  Because against the real adversaries, the real threats, you really are nearly all in it together.