The message is on the walls, in the streets, hanging from overpasses and scrawled across water-towers. It’s being flowed into microphones and bullhorns, and it’s trending on Twitter. It’s moving the masses into peaceful protest, as they chant it across the nation “black lives matter” and the police aren’t hearing it.
(Cop Modus Operandi.) A black life is taken needlessly at the hands of a police officer, or officers (implement of death varies), and the police do nothing but protect and serve themselves while leaving us lost in the dark as to why in the fuck this has happened once again. (It’s played out.) “We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black People” — No. 7 of the Black Panther Party’s “Ten-Point Program,” unveiled on May 17, 1967, and here we are in 2016, with the blood of black lives streaming in the streets and on Facebook Live.
(So Let’s Reflect.) If you are lucky enough to be living a somewhat-pampered and posh life, your views and opinions on police protocol are skewed at best, and that “one-bad-apple-spoils-the-bunch” line of dialogue so many of you like to parade around, like you’re Mark fucking Twain, is horse shit: We’re talking systematic racism passed through the ranks like an STD. So be chill, and zip it. Let the struggle speak, and listen to what it is saying, and hopefully we’ll reach higher ground together.
(Prime Directives.) Police declared war on the poor a million fuckin’ years ago. The public pit has been feeling the wrath of the brass for so long, we have gone over the precipice and into retaliation valley, and that’s lethal for every single breathing body in this country — a country in which a traffic violation can turn a poor person’s life into quicksand, a country in which prison is for profit, a country in which juveniles are devoured by a judicial system stacked against them — and a country in which a white hipster with an open can of tuna tattooed on his face can legally grow a warehouse full of weed, make great sums of money and, thanks to privilege, he’s smiled upon and viewed as a zany, downright whimsical person of great singularity, and as an entrepreneurial wunderkind, but a black man slinging dime-bags out of his jalopy, with his daughters’ names branded over his heart, is labeled a gangster menace, and he gets cracked the fuck down by an overly-aggressive law enforcement, which is only too happy to perpetuate and prod the problem.
(Spin Cycle.) Describing the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile as “brash” or a “spate” is disingenuous to the point of dehumanization. Law enforcement inflicting summary executions on minorities is a long-honored tradition of the men and women in blue, and they don’t seem capable of change; they literally have a heritage of being dead-wrong on every social issue you can fathom, from Prohibition, to Jim Crow, to abortion, to sexual acceptance, to the war on drugs and to immigration. And, like all foul heritage, they are clinging to it.
(I Need A Hero.) Let’s talk heroics and respect: There’s nothing heroic about five armed men in uniform beating a single black man into a bloody pulp. There’s nothing to respect, or to hold in reserve, about a man who chokes another man to death for selling loose cigarettes. I don’t think of bravery when I see law enforcement shoot a man point-blank dead through a car window, as a little girl sits in the back seat. There wasn’t a drop of courageous action when a cop willfully slaughtered 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun. There’s no moxie in the Rodney King beating, and no compassion in civil forfeiture, or slamming a woman to the pavement as you zip-tie her immobile, and there ain’t no chivalry in police marching on a peaceful protest while dressed as faceless, mechanized war machines, the barrels of high-caliber guns aimed at the citizens of the United States. Where’s the heroics or humanity? When having already fired more then 100,000 rounds of ammunition into a Philadelphia row-house, the authorities, not having quenched their lust for carnage get the bright idea to load a helicopter with gel-explosives and drop a fucking bomb on the roof of an American household, murdering six adults and five children, and, ultimately, because of orders given from up on-high, letting a fire rage to the point of burning down 65 fucking homes, thus rendering over 250 people homeless — an entire community destroyed by police brutality.
(List Of Demands.) Black Lives Matter has penned a 10-part manifesto, titled “Campaign Zero,” laying out real, logical change that, if implemented by law enforcement across the board, would truly help put an end to all this bloodshed, and I suggest you read it and support it.
