Week Eleven

Yeah I skipped a week. Just assume I wrote a few hundred words on adjusting to not working and viewing with increasing alarm the countries' death march towards reopening and you'll get the idea. I am not here today to talk about that.

Ignited by yet another blatant murder of a black man caught on camera, the country has been gripped by protests and riots on a scale not seen since perhaps the assassination of MLK, and a police response of a viciousness that I am pretty sure is uniquely 2020's. Oh there have been "isolated" incidents of literal massacres in the past before, the Kent State massacre comes to mind, as do a few times when black people tried to have towns and livelihoods not reliant on the white community. But for sheer, simultaneous, widespread brutality? I don't think we have seen the like in living memory.

As we observe and react to what is happening across the nation that we keep in mind a few things, the first is that we not be distracted by people shifting the narrative. By that I mean folks who choose to focus on condemning the looting before addressing the reason the looting happened, or those who want to talk about how "outside agitators" are coming in to protests and that this is not representative of the community, or any other narrative distraction that comes to mind. The core of the issue is that the police have been executing people, mostly minorities, at will for decades, centuries really, and nothing has been done about it.

We can talk about the root causes of that, the institutional racism, the slavery, and so on, but the heart of the matter is the people who are supposed to protect us are killing and stealing from us at will, they are caught doing it, it is illegal to do, they are on camera, with witnesses, and they still do it, because they know they will get away with it and because they know that somewhere in the neighborhood of half the population of the country thinks it is right and proper for them to do so.

Anyone attempting to talk about the events of the past week and going forward under any other terms is either being intentionally disingenuous or a fool, if they are the former they must not be debated under any circumstances, that is what they want, they don't want to talk about the murders of minorities in cold blood, they want to force us to argue in circles around ever increasing loops of tenuously related topics until no one observing can figure out what is happening. They know what they are doing and should not be given the opportunity to do it. They should be mocked, told to shut up and get back on topic, or ignored, but they should not be given any more platform than they already take for themselves.
If they are the latter case, the fools, then I guess it depends on your own judgement, the fools may be educable, I myself, even not too long ago relatively speaking, had OPINIONS on violence in protests and aired those without thinking before and instead of talking about the reasons for the protests, and I got better eventually, maybe it would have been faster with someone leading me by the hand, maybe not, that is for the individual who would do the educating to decide, either way it shouldn't be done in a public platform, the resources to educate yourself are by now widely available, this education can be done with private messages, conversations, or links, and public discussion has to return to the focus of the matter.

The other thing to keep in mind is that none of the horrible shit that has happened has happened by accident. I don't just mean police brutality, I mean everything, well maybe the murder hornets were an accident. No I am not saying that the Coronavirus was created or released intentionally, but for every disaster we have had, someone saw it coming, we had plans and teams in place to deal with it, and the plans that we went with were not chosen by accident.

We look at what is happening and we ask ourselves why, why did our leaders, protectors, and titans of industry seem to choose the path that would make everything just as bad as possible? It's almost as if they are doing their best to hurt people. Friends I am here to tell you that is exactly right.

The cruelty is the point.

The reaction and preparation for Covid can't be considered a failure, because there was never a plan to succeed in the first place. The riots happening right now, literally as I type at 4:16 AM Pacific time, are happening because the police and those who give them orders told them it was okay to murder, and that they should escalate every protest as soon as it seemed convenient. The purpose was to maximize suffering, to make us know our place, to keep the people so scared of putting themselves out there that they would make a desperate grab for anything approaching the status quo.

No I am not saying that the Coronavirus preparedness is an intentional psyop or anything, I am saying that in the middle of their plans to wreck any semblance of pandemic protection in return for short term profits, the people doing so considered the lives that would be lost and they said to themselves "This is the ideal solution." Maybe some of them regretted that lots of people would die, but most of them likely considered that it would be a good thing and "reduce the surplus population."
The police response to the protests are similar, but even more intentional. The plan was always to maximize suffering, The plans for general crime prevention are the same as the plans for police response to peaceful protest in this country and boil down to "We'll torture you as much as we can get away with so stay in line." That's it, the cruelty is the point.

Our leaders, elected and otherwise, all made the choice to hurt us intentionally and willfully, there were other options they could have selected, even options that would allow them to continue looting the country and making money, possibly even more money! But they chose this one specifically because it is cruel, to send a message to the people that they aren't people at all, just "human capital" and there to be spent at the rulers' discretion.

That is what is being fought against, not one of them deserves even a hint of sympathy until they show it to us. Every cop is a monster who covers up murder until they prove to us they aren't by testifying against their co-workers, every politician is an enemy of anyone making less than a million dollars a year until they prove they aren't by publicly and consistently working against the private interests who benefit from the cruelty of our current policies.

Every billionaire is bad and the world would be better off with each one of them dropped alone into a desert and torn apart by coyotes. Without exception, and with nothing they can do to prove otherwise. I am prepared to accept that someone who maybe wins the lottery or something to become a billionaire may be good, but they still would have a lot to prove.

Does it sound like I am pissed off? If you said yes it is because I am. I want you to consider the source of the above rant. Me, Logan, 36, straight, white, male, unemployed by choice during the Coronavirus. I've had very little true hardship in my life and outside of a bunk ticket I got while biking late one night years ago all my interactions with authority, police included, have been entirely cordial. I am not rich and will probably never be, but aside from that I have a pretty fucking good life and will likely continue to do so.

I am furious enough that the Secret Service would probably never let me in the same building as the president just on instinct. If I could kill people with my brain there would be bodies stacked three deep in the halls of government.

And that is me, who has barely endured hardship in his life.

What do you think the average black person feels like, all the time?