A distorted reality is now a necessity to be free
The American police have violently attacked peaceful American protesters.
There is no other way to put it, no other lens to look at it through. Yes, there have been violent protesters, but not that many of them, and they’re not the only ones getting attacked. Yes, there are people breaking property and looting stores, but there are also innocent people — a photographer covering the protests in Minneapolis, for example — getting eyes shot out with rubber bullets.
The police will never be accountable for this.
In Seattle, a woman had an umbrella open, so the police started pepper spraying everyone.
The police will never acknowledge that they were wrong here. There will be no statement, no acknowledgement, no reckoning.
This is what America has chosen to be. The moment we, as a country, made this choice was when we demonized Colin Kaepernick for what was, objectively, the perfect protest. Not only did it not hurt anyone, but it didn’t even inconvenience anyone. The football game started at the same time. His protest didn’t disrupt society in any way, at all, and it still wasn’t good enough. If getting on one knee during the national anthem was unacceptable — and apparently it was — then no protest, ever, under any circumstances, would be okay.
It was better to demonize Kaepernick and destroy his career than it was to acknowledge that what he was saying, that police are killing black people, was true. It was easier to say that he didn’t have the right to say what he was saying in the way he was saying it than it was to say he was right.
There is, of course, a massive gap between being mad at a football player and allowing cops to attack citizens all over the country. But the lines drawn in the sand during Kaepernick, the lines that said we can’t criticize the police, and we can’t protest them, and we can’t talk about them, led us right here, to the cops tear gassing peaceful protesters — using tear gas is a fucking war crime, by the way — so that the President can go outside without being heckled.
These are freedoms that we’ve given up, freedoms fundamental to the idea of America. Because we’re not allowed to protest against police now without the police turning violent. They can make all the excuses they want about security and looting, but the right of Vans to keep all their shoes in stock should not supersede the rights of Americans to assemble.
Or, to put it another way:
So large swaths of the country decide to lie to themselves about it. True freedom is being allowed to buy items. Real freedom is assembling to complain about shelter in place orders, not assembling to complain about police violence. You can’t be free if you think you might not be safe, so we need the police to make sure we’re safe, even if they have to restrict someone’s freedom to not be murdered in the street in the process.
You disappoint me
You people raking in on the world
The devil's script sells
You the heart of a blackbird.
We muddle through, allowing calamity after calamity and getting mad when people notice. We have no moral superiority, no right to criticize other countries for repressing their citizens in the same way we do. We are not what we tell ourselves we are, and we never can be as long as we allow black people to die at the hands of police and prohibit protests about it.
We set curfews to keep people from going outside, and set up barricades to keep them from going where we don’t want them to, and put up roadblocks so they can’t vote, and do everything in our power to maintain a broken and immoral power structure. We have turned freedom into a parody of itself, and we have done it on purpose. I don’t know that there is a way out of this because I don’t know that enough Americans want there to be.
If George Floyd had managed to get up and kill Derek Chauvin instead of Chauvin killing him, then he would have been the bad guy. Instead, he died. There’s no happy ending here because the police are willing to use overwhelming force against their citizens, and citizens aren’t allowed to fight back, even if the police are wrong. We have granted them absolute power, and so there will always be a large part of society that has to justify it, no matter what they do.
The answer is to completely reshape how our society operates, but America is too scared and cowardly for that. So we’ll end up moving on and pretending it’s okay. That’s not all we should do, but it is all we do.
Take it away, Elliott.
So disappointing,
First I put it all down to luck
God knows why my
Country don't give a fuck