Stop shaking your head and DO SOMETHING!

Facts: two black men who didn’t deserve to die for their perceived crimes were killed by police this week, and these murders incited a deranged asshole with a sniper rifle to act out in vengeance for these crimes by targeting white police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas – resulting in the murders of 5 police and at least 7 other injured people.

I was disturbed by the videos of the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile – I cried after 3 seconds worth of footage of Castile and had to avoid the internet for hours. I woke up this morning and heard news of violence against police in Texas and my heart broke even worse. I’m livid and despondent because EVERYDAY now people are being gunned down senselessly in America because as a society we refuse to address pernicious behaviors and injustices; instead we stand on soap boxes and write bitter social media posts and share half-baked memes that only perpetuate hatred and bigotry.

We need to accept the fact that there are law enforcement officers that are not fit to wear the badge, because they are exceedingly aggressive/racist/bigots/are corrupt – whatever the case may be. There are poisoned apples in EVERY profession that serves the public; law enforcement is NO exception. I will quickly assert that the majority of police are upstanding men and women who got into police work for the right reasons and act according to the law, but they need to be the ones who call these bad apples out on their shit. The Black Lives Matter movement and public statements from government officials and general outrage from social media count for shit; the truth is good cops allow the fragile trust that the public has for law enforcement to degrade and civil rights to be trampled every time they hide behind the “brotherhood of blue” and blindly defend a bad cop who needlessly gunned down a citizen whose crime did not merit violent retaliation from police. This is a societal cancer; an institutionalized way of thinking that pervades across the nation – that an officer’s life is inherently at risk whenever they approach or stop a civilian of color, regardless of what the person is being questioned about. It’s also a given that the life of the civilian is automatically worth less than the life of the law enforcement official, so when a completely innocent man such as Philando Castile is gunned down in his car having violated NO LAWS, with legal gun permits and calm disclosure of his concealed carry weapon, no one from the NRA or from the upper echelons of law enforcement rose up and decried the murdering officer – they looked for ways to drag the victim’s name in the dirt, and when no dirt could be found, his death was labeled “a senseless tragedy.”

This happened to Alton Sterling, a small time criminal who was gunned down the day prior to Castile in Louisiana, who was killed by two officers who have a history of being investigated for police brutality. Did the man have a criminal record? Sure. Does the fact that he had a criminal record/the fact that he was breaking a minor law when he was initially approached by police justify the fact that he was murdered for struggling during his apprehension? NO. He should have spent the night in the slammer with some bruises and a fat lip and endured the punishment of his crime – but because he was a black man in a racist backwater at the mercy of brutal police officers, his murder is seen by most as an acceptable result of his life choices. It’s the same disgusting mentality people use against rape victims: what did you expect; flirting/wearing those close/being in a bar? Silly black man: what did you expect selling bootleg CDs in a parking lot? I’m not suggesting Sterling was an angel – it’s the same bullshit that happened when Michael Brown was murdered. These men were entitled to a fair trial for their crimes – but they received bullets instead. The job of a police officer is a difficult one, and I agree they are over worked, under staffed, stressed, and often in danger and do not receive thanks often enough for all they do. But none of those reasons should entitle a police officer to shoot first and ask questions later during a simple stop or arrest. I fully understand that law enforcement officers want to be able to go home and kiss their spouse and children at night, and in theory any person on the street could strip them of this ability – but when police place no value on the lives of the people they are charged with protecting, even if these people have committed a crime and deserve to be apprehended – we don’t have order, we have totalitarianism. WE CANNOT CONTINUE TO GRANT AUTHORITY FIGURES CARTE BLANCHE TO DO WHATEVER THEY WANT SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY WEAR A BADGE, OR A PRIEST COLLAR, OR HAVE A HIGH SECURITY CLEARANCE! If those who enforce our laws are exempt from laws – we don’t have order. We have what we currently have: anarchy, in which anyone with a grudge against any category of people (minorities, law enforcement, Muslims, LGBT, etc) can legally buy a gun, and carry out a killing spree.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY CENTRAL POINT: we live in a society that encourages violence by continuing to allow the Second Amendment to go largely unchecked; where the law unequally applies to people of color with respect to the right to bear arms. Think about the string of murders this week: two black men who were armed but not acting violently prior to their encounters with police (ONE OF WHOM LEGALLY HAD HIS WEAPON ON HIS PERSON AND DECLARED AS MUCH), and innocent officers performing their duty at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas – states away from where those two murders took place. The common denominator here appears to be police interaction with the public, but that happens every day in every town in America. The common denominator here is the presence of firearms. When a state allows people to legally carry guns on their person; it is IMPOSSIBLE for law enforcement to tell immediately if that weapon is lawful or not on a citizen. EVEN IF IT IS LAWFULLY OWNED, WHO IS TO SAY THE OWNER WILL NOT COMMIT HOMICIDE WITH IT?! Naturally, the police proceed aggressively – because in a world where any citizen may be packing, a police officer may be the victim of gun violence. So it is on the one hand understandable why police overreact and use unnecessary violence against citizens who they perceive to be suspicious (disproportionally men of color). But it is also unacceptable for the police to just decide that because a person seems threatening they automatically lose their right to LIVE without even a hint at due process. WE CANNOT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS – either we constrict access to guns to the point where the police don’t have to panic every time someone reaches into their pocket or glove compartment for their ID, or we continue to let every Joe Schmo have a gun and the police DO need to fear for their lives because of the prevalence of guns and we wind up with the sort of escalating retaliatory murders we saw this week.

Secondly: if we could set aside our murder weapons for even an hour; if we could just sit and talk human to human, we would see that all of this blind, viral, infectious hatred that we have against sub-sets of other people based on stupid shit like their race/ethnicity/religion/sexuality is entirely based on fear and devoid of any kind of logic. We need to recognize that the world is very rarely as simple as black and white – you cannot relegate people into “Good” or “Bad” simply because they are black, or lesbian, or worship a different invisible man in the sky than you, or they committed a crime once and served a prison sentence. Not everyone who wears a badge is a corrupt monster, and not everyone who has committed a crime is an evil deviant. The fuckers that compose ISIS kill as many Muslims as they do Christians or other religious minorities – not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all white people are racist bigots, and not all Christians are homophobes. We need to stop following leaders that point their hypocritical lying fingers at groups of people as being the culprits for all of our social and economic woes (THAT IS A BLATANT REFERENCE TO TRUMP AND MOST OF CONGRESS) and we need to start assessing facts and thinking critically whenever we hear some statistic rattled off on the news or on Facebook. My immediate enemy is not a sociopathic police officer, or a black man with a criminal record, or a white supremacist asshole: my immediate enemies are sheeple that form opinions about a category of people based on cultural and social stereotypes who then proceed to support violence and civil rights violations against these people through apathy, because if you refuse to stand up for EQUAL RIGHTS UNDER THE LAW FOR ALL CITIZENS, if you refuse to call a spade a spade no matter how high ranking or seemingly respectable this person is, if you refuse to recognize injustice and just sit idly by while people you don’t know are victimized by biased and violent social institutions, you are a pathetic waste of human consciousness and a disgrace to the values that this country was founded on.

Societal problems are not easily solved, nor quickly solved, but through dialogue and peaceful protests we can achieve something closer to equal rights and equal protection under the law. We cannot protest in peace when guns are as prevalent as cars. We must vote for representatives who recognize the difficulties faced by their constituents; we need an electorate that will legislate in ways that foster non-violence and conflict resolution at the community level. What we have is a nation divided by irrational hatreds rooted in religious and socioeconomic misinformation, and an electorate that is so corrupted by money and influence from wealthy interest groups that nothing is ever accomplished in the interest of the common American. Social mobility is dead, along with the American dream because of student loan and healthcare debts, and still we cling to our precious guns and blame undocumented Hispanics or war refugees from Syria for everything that afflicts us. WAKE. THE FUCK. UP. If we spent as much effort uniting to fight against the institutions that actually oppress us – no matter race or class or religion – as we do scapegoating and infighting – we would actually have a nation worth waking up in everyday. A nation where your positive choices and merits allow you to succeed, where you can go to the movie or to a social gathering without the fear of being gunned down by a homicidal gun-owner with a grudge, a nation where the pigment in your skin doesn’t increase the likelihood of you being arrested or killed by police, a nation where you can walk down the street wearing conservative dress or a hijab and not have to wonder if this will incite violence from a person of a different religion, or wear a very tight dress and not have to live in fear of being raped on your way home from a party. Stop shaking your head and DO SOMETHING. Stand up to injustice, please, or everything the Founding Fathers sought to do 240 years ago was for nothing. Just a belatedly failed revolution for the history books.