"If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected-those, precisely, who need the laws's protection most!-and listens to their testimony."
- James Baldwin
My mind is spinning with thoughts from just seeing Detroit. Of course I could also write about The Dark Tower or Atomic Blonde. I've seen a fair number of films lately if you consider that most movies I do see are franchise films, and most of those have flickered out for the moment till fall hits with its newest hits. It may just be that I want to support daring pictures—or perhaps anything except for that Emoji thing. Anything but that. Still, the three I have seen in the past week are all far better than I'd expected, and the one I refuse to see still required hundreds of people to work their darndest.
I do wonder how many illustrators and techs and other young film lovers may get their start working on any years' big stinkers. It may be simple to think that any level of quality in the animation or effects or background bits is a direct product of the money so absurdly spent, but behind every horrible package that makes it to the screen you've got a near-endless chain of dedicated folks on the daily grind to at least make their tiny speck of artistic chip in the massive sculpture of polished turd.
Then of course, there are great movies. Ones that make you stop and think or simply awe or shake and shiver with glee, horror, wonder, or plain ol' speechless bewilderment. I could and would like to go on and on about such flicks. What a blood-sparkling joy.
But there's a road spike in my esophagus, buddy. Oh man.
We are smart, you know that? We are wonderfully brilliant when we mean to be.
We can do so many gorgeous and wondrous and astounding things.
And yet. AND YET—
WHY DO COPS STILL USE GUNS TO STOP FOLKS!?!!
Why of all our technology and brilliance is a lethal weapon even in the arsenal of those charged to serve and protect?
What is the point of a law if not to protect our rights? Those who enforce the law do the exact opposite when all their means of enforcement require physically and otherwise harming us. Oh they don't need to use a firearm, no. They can just taser you to death or bludgeon you to death or choke you with a knee to the back.
Now you may say that if criminals have guns then cops need them, but not likely because I respect your intelligence and that's a bs strawman kinda thing to say. Do we prefer our cops to be like criminals? Of course not, because if we did then our cops wouldn't get away with nearly so much murder of unarmed civilians. Our cops shouldn't even murder armed civilians. You know why? Because of the 2nd amendment for one thing, and for another—more important—thing, because you can't explain what you're up to in a fair trial before a judge and a jury of your peers if, instead of being captured and arrested in a way which respects your rights and your body, you are instead shot and killed or strangled or have an accident on the ride to the station.
While we're all caught up in a national huff over whatever new lie or snafu our dear Mr. Prez has most recently tweeted or fired or hired or canceled protection of or WHATEVER—not that those things don't matter, but—people are slaughtered every single day in this country by police officers.
I could take this space to say that NOT ALL cops are like that, but you've read that elsewhere I'm sure.
The whole BLUE LIVES MATTER thing is like how if after wearing protective glasses while doing an experiment in science class around potentially dangerous chemicals, I went to the burn unit at the hospital and screamed at someone who'd gone blind in a house fire...that I had also set with those same dangerous chemicals. Point is, anyone who chooses to be apart of a corrupt system is either unaware of the corruption or doesn't care or agrees with it. Option one, do you really want someone that stupid or uninformed policing anywhere? Option two, do you really want someone that complacent policing anywhere? And Option three, you've got everyone who cries on about how sanctuary cities are unpatriotic and local authorities should comply with ICE.
What I'm saying is that human rights and human lives matter more than the grid-lines which uphold an unjust system. Anyone who is willing to defend those walls, lines, and glass ceilings at the expense of human rights and human lives does not see those on the other side as deserving of those same rights or even their lives.
While we're down here squabbling over the block, there's genocide the next block over. Keeping us bickering and drooling over the next stupid scandal is a great way to keep funding a machine which continuously drops bombs on houses and families overseas and slaughters black and brown americans on the daily over here.
But you gotta support the heroes, right?
I don't support anyone who would rather take another person's life than use their own conscience. I think I'd be a much more patriotic, supportive kinda guy if the ones giving the orders gave a damn about human lives over some lines on a map and some decimal places on a budget.
Maybe I'm impractical, naive, an idiot, whatever...
But how's that practicality doing for the families who's kids aren't coming home?
You know all I ever have to give you on this blog is anecdotes and feelings, and I won't proclaim to have anything more than that. I'm a writer not a politician.
So when I called the cops after that kid robbed me at gunpoint and they came in to laugh at me and question me over and over with racist rhetoric...or all the times I had to call them when a drunk guy was threatening me or the other guests and they'd laugh at me again and drive off if they showed up or even returned my calls...or when they were rough with the woman who sat their bleeding to death, accusing her of prostitution, dumping out her purse, and making comments about the way she was dressed... well, those are my anecdotal evidence. My personal stories aren't anywhere near as harsh as so many other folks' are. Certainly they never treated me quite as bad as when I was sleeping in my car and they'd find me parked somewhere and wake me up with a gun to the window glass.
But how much worse must it be to live life so heavily under the scrutiny of death dealing uniforms that your sense of citizenship and property and neighborhood identity is completely separate from anything I can understand?
We look at riots and marches and looting and we see wild savagery and insanity. We can't possibly comprehend the separation between our view of commerce and property as identity and that of someone else who does not. To destroy our own street and burn our own home seems so ludicrous to us because it is our own. And I can't begin to understand it, because I grew up that way. But just imagine with me that what we own and where we belong was not. Just imagine that instead of being able to say this place and this stuff is mine and thus I deserve all the rights and privileges therein, instead you are treated as a constant stranger, a constant vagrant, a constant intruder even on your own home block. Even in your own neighborhood and house. Even when it comes to the sanctity and safety of your very body, you are treated with a contempt and an alienation which is the very definition of dehumanization.
And that is how we enforce our laws. With lethal force from hands fed by dehumanizing hate. It is fascist bigotry. It is unjust. It is American.
Thanks for reading,
Odist
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