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| Enough said: source, Facebook |
Michael Brown should have finished his first week in college. I am not elevating him to apotheosis, just stating a fact. He was likely going to a community college, perhaps learning a skill as a technician. Or, he may have had higher aspirations and shoring up his study skills and academics in a less challenging setting. The problem is, we'll never know the answer.
Instead, he was gunned down, left in the streets for approximately four hours for apparently the lethal crime of jaywalking. Yes, Chief Barney Fife - over a municipality of approximately 21,000 citizens - released a video no less than the Department Of Justice advised he not release, publicly trying a dead teenager that can't object; alluding his video taped guilt of shop lifting cigars from an convenience store was the motive for stopping him (the incidents were separate events). Then, disavowed all knowledge of the story in his second televised interview (then suggesting his officer might have known after all), leaving shocked reporters figuratively with their mouths wide open at the level of their feet. Michael’s democratic governor was feckless and useless during public rebuke Saturday. Senators Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth Warren (D); Ted Cruz and Rand Paul (R) all decried the excessive force of the Missouri Police Department. The irony is this impressive display of militarism wasn't used at the Cliven Bundy Ranch where militia pointed weapons at Bureau of Land Management agents – a federal offense that ended in no dead bodies, an avoided standoff and the tax-evading $1.2 million dollar moocher still on his ranch.
Since the election of the country’s first African American president, we've seen the ugly side of this country that can be illustrated in this faux-related pattern recognition (attributed to Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, “The Isis Papers”):
AMERICA
A-M-E-R-I-C-A…
I-A-M-E-R-C-A…
I-A-M-R-E-C-A…
I-A-M-R-A-C-E…
“I AM RACE.”
The first African American president (representing a 2.3% probability of "other-than-white-male" since Washington to W) and attorney general are essentially being sued and presumably impeached – individually and/or respectively - for the crime of “president while black”; “attorney general while black” a clear escalation of the “uppity” charge in southern parlance:
Uppity: Taking liberties or assuming airs beyond one's place in a social hierarchy. Assuming equality with someone higher up the social ladder - Urban Dictionary
Michael Brown did the “right things,” though obviously no angel - what teenager is? He “pulled himself up by his own boot straps” which is the usual escape for “we’re NOT going to help you get to whatever your dreams are.” Now he’s the inspiration for the mantra “hands up; don’t shoot!” It is a hash tag; it is a movement in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Howard University and Austin. The veracity of it is currently being investigated as the identity of the officer that shot Michael Brown in the incident report – a public record – has finally been released days after his death – Darren Wilson.
Suddenly, jaywalking can result in lethal force applied to the walker. A video is produced supposedly showing Michael taking cigars from a convenience store. If that is a requisite for deadly force, then the four teenagers that kleptomaniac-ed sneakers as I was being frisked decades ago by the now defunct King's Department Store "defective detective" (inept of logical reasoning, devoid of courtesy and simple police procedure) all should have been shot on sight. The KKK is raising money for the officer that shot Mike Brown as they did for George Zimmerman. And like the case of Eric Garner (“I can’t breathe”) this goes before a Grand Jury, the majority-at-this-point-MAJORITY Grand Jury.
I am angry as an African American male...I am angry as the father of African American males that have never committed a misdemeanor or felony, working in education and engineering respectively to UPLIFT society. I am angry at a society that has made us targets for a rage that is disgusting. I am angry that the six shots - 2 in the head - to subdue Michael Brown for jaywalking were six more than the zero it took to bring Jeffrey Dahmer, James Holmes and Jared Lee Loughner into custody - all mass murderers and the first named a cannibal! They walked into a police office - they were not rolled into a morgue!
Answer: the status quo that reactionary minds usually defend. Note this description of the book by author Cory Robin, “The Reactionary Mind” (2011):
Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?
Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.
Uppity…Jaywalking…“Let’s see the birth certificate!” Then, when they actual see it in long form, not believing it…“I want my country back!”…Uppity.
For the liberal/logical, science-based mind, the election of the first black president in the history of the republic was the “Moses moment”; the culmination of King’s “I Have a Dream” exploited by both liberal and conservative politicians and theologians. On the 2008 election, the recently departed Dr. Maya Angelou reflected: “America has finally grown up!” The only time I will ever disagree with the great lady: 150 years later, we're still fighting the Civil War, as if the outcome is still under contention.
For the conservative, reactionary mind, Barack Obama is “the other,” the usurper: Antichrist in some extreme conspiracies. He's faced continual, relentless opposition that has never been seen for any president and never will after his well-deserved retirement. His youth has been sapped by real and contrived crises; internal and external. He looks 80. He didn't need a Supreme Court to decide the count in the same state as his Governor Brother, but he was illegitimate from the aspect that he’d “left his place”; he got the nuclear codes and didn't start Armageddon; he had the audacity to order the kill shots for Somali pirates, Qaddafi and “The Boogie Man” Osama Bin Laden. Couple that with doubling the Dow Jones since the "Great Recession" of 2008; 40+ months of positive job growth, an unemployment rate of 6.2% and you as opposition have a distinct problem with "message." The reactionary opposition is an anti-government movement (that somehow got elected) with the laughable acumen in civics lower than second graders, and a congress with the low confidence score of 14% only means their schemes for “limited government” is about 86% - a successful score once your perspective is flipped.
The threats started in 2007 when he was Senator from Illinois…CANDIDATE, as also Herman Cain experienced in 2012. His first audacity was to win (2008), and then win again (2012) after the opposition meant his defeat even at sacrifice of the democratic republic. The acceleration of age is in the grey in his hair; the lines in his face. He has to balance the complete anarchy of Iraq spiraling out of control after executing the “Status of Forces Agreement” negotiated by his predecessor. He’s being sued in a carnival circus for not implementing the Affordable Care Act – based on a 1989 position paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation – FAST enough, the same act they voted to DE-fund 52 times and suggest impeachment for: following all that?
“I AM RACE.”
No less than the UN is publishing a study at the end of August on our compliance with the elimination of all forms of racism - I'm guessing our "grade" will be below a C-. The ugly underbelly of American bigotry/hierarchy is being exposed to the world via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all new mediums as transformative to political engagement as television was to world opinion on the brutality visited upon marchers in the Civil Rights Movement; the opposition to the Vietnam War generated at home. The militarization of policing in communities of color by Barney Fife with MRAPs, tear gas, and sub-machine guns with rubber bullets originated in '72; accelerated in '94, and especially after 9-11 with the "global war on terror," like the "war on drugs" designed as never-ending. In this regard, Barney doesn't shoot the floor inches from his toes and an eye-rolling, groaning Andy Griffith takes his one bullet - his substantial armory is for the battlefield. Otis – the Mayberry town drunk – still staggers in on Friday nights to let himself in his cell; he has nothing, NOTHING to worry about from MRAPs, machine guns, rubber bullets or tear gas…he’s not "the threat" Barney’s likely to react violently to. I don't know how long the global economy will tolerate this until the Dollar is replaced by the Yuan and Euro, and for our reaching back to an "Ozzie and Harriet" utopia that never existed - seals our irrelevance in the pages of history.
The wretchedness of racism is as evident in 2014 as was in 1914 or 1864. Renisha McBride, Michael Brown, Jonathan Ferrell, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis are the president and attorney general in effigy; they are accessible targets of Barney's et al delusional psychopathic hatred...they will eventually find other targets not based on melanin.
"We The People" all are.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Added:
Democracy Now!:
Ferguson Protests Erupt Near Grave of Ex-Slave Dred Scott, Whose Case Helped Fuel U.S. Civil War
PBS: Dred Scott case: the Supreme Court decision
