Minneapolis Lessons

One cannot watch the video of the Minneapolis Police Department’s, slow, deliberate, torturous murder of George Floyd and not be outraged if you have any pretension at all of being a decent human being.  It was murder.  Three officers sit on a man, one with his knee on the neck.  Their justification, the man wouldn’t get into the police car.  How is a facedown man in handcuffs being held down by three officers supposed to comply with that order?  He repeatedly said he would comply, they continued to demand he get in as they prevented him from doing so.  None of them has been arrested, or the fourth cop who watched it happen.  Who did the Minneapolis Police manage to arrest today?  A Black CNN reporter who was there documenting them.  Yet the other CNN team just yards away, with the White CNN reporter, was left utterly unmolested.

  These reporters were exercising their Constitutional right completely lawfully.  They were reporting from where they had been told to report by the police.  When confronted they repeatedly asked where the police would prefer them to be before they were arrested.  There is only one reason you remove reporters from the scene like this.  They are about to do something they don’t want to be seen.  

  Fascism stalks our streets openly right now.  Yet people are upset about a Target getting looted?  The police are and have been for generations, hunting Black people for sport, and rarely if ever face even the most minor of consequences.  Colin Kaepernick peacefully protested this and was vilified.  Denied employment.  Had the President of the United States repeatedly attack and urge violence against him.  Now you demand to know why people won’t protest peacefully?  “A riot is the language of the unheard.”  It was true when Dr. King said it in 1968, and it remains true today.

 Further, in our current late-stage capitalist society we have commoditized everything.  Government officials are actually openly saying it is okay for three to five percent of our school children to die to get the economy going again.  They are advocating killing off the elderly by ending medical care and forcing them to work high-risk jobs for the same reason.  Given that even the lives of our children and parents are so commodified, how can you not understand that looting is a legitimate form of protest?  Looting directly strikes at the heart of the system that says THINGS, and MONEY are more important than LIFE.  These corporations like Target, Wendy’s, and Auto Zone buy our politicians.  They support the racist status quo.  They are in military parlance, legitimate targets.

  The corporations, our government, and our government’s street gangs understand two things alone.  Money, and force.  They have used theirs for generations to keep people of color down.  They made peaceful change impossible.  As President Kennedy said, “Those that make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”  So, the answer is to use force back and to strike at their money.  They don't care how many Black and Brown children are murdered, but they are outraged if one of their televisions is stolen off the shelf.  Steal them all, burn the stores.  I won't condemn you for it.  A twelve-year-old kid gets murdered by the police playing in the park, and you take out two cops in retaliation. I can’t argue with that equation.  

  We have made this inevitable, and righteous by our actions and our inactions.  We stole this land, we built it on the backs of slaves.  All the while spouting the most soaring rhetoric about equality and freedom.  The bill is finally coming due.  America, you are now beginning to reap what you have sowed.  We deserve it.