Seeing-as-how a couple days ago a down-to-Earth but established star like Anna Kendrick has started #Tweeting about it, maybe you can pass it on to your #JoeThePlumber type relatives before #FauxNews starts slandering her as an #Atheist #Lesbian #BabyEater, or the #qAnon / #MAGA types try to murder her.
I mean. They couldn’t stop themselves from blatantly escalating things. Even for a few days, even cynically, even for the optics.
There are always folks who deny, justify, and excuse brutality though. Pictures and video recordings have traditionally been ignored. I say traditionally because law enforcement has been murdering unarmed cooperating Black men & women for AT LEAST a decade...
𝄕𝄞𝄚 𝅘𝅥 . You don't know me! 𝄚𝄀𝄚 I'm the O. P.D.! 𝅘𝅥𝅯 . 𝄚𝄂
Most people take law enforcement for granted, and by that I mean it's assumed to have always been that way and that it's acceptable. It's well documented how the #USA formed it's #Police forces in order to maintain the #sinful institution of #Slavery (see also: Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 & of 1850, Encyclopædia Britannica, TIME Magazine and Eastern Kentucky Universityfor starters), but most of us are blissfully unaware of the darker driving truths.
A tidbit that comes out early in this week's #FAIR #Podcast called #CounterSpin, is that the #Brittish #PD (Bobbies) has a dark past as well.
The culture that forms an entity lingers on long after the people and reasons for forming an institution have died. It takes a lot of energy over generations to clean that garbage legacy culture out of an organization when everybody is willing to remove it. Collectively #Americans are not ready willing or able to remove our sins of #Racism and #Opressing the #Poor from policing because a minority of "us" (the wealthy) want it that way, and they can afford to produce a steady stream of propaganda convincing the majority of people beyond their interests into defending indefensible actions that come out of those institutions.
A stark truth that I personally see is that #Policing internally and #Military #Occupations externally are de facto the same thing for the same reasons put into motion by the same people for the same reasons. We have not yet really left #Feudalism, our #democracy is as big an #illusion as a #video-game.
I don't know how exactly to deal with my white friends lately. I could have the same headspace of ignorance but for a lucky random event that changed my direction towards #open-mindedness about two decades ago. They aren't exposed to the realities of people without power or money. They don't know they should be exposed to those harsh realities. They don't know because of how #society has formed and they don't know how it has been #manipulated by people with #power and #capital.
A person in my circles asked me what I thought about what's going on in the news lately. He asked because his mind is starting to open, but it bothered me that he didn't ask that question when the Koch instigated and funded armed militia groups were storming State Capital buildings because they wanted hair-cuts and bowling. I didn't resist mentioning that to him. I also had to ask him, "How many people had their necks kneeled on but didn't die?"
I'm not sure I helped guide him closer to knowing. Us #ignorant #white #middle-class people didn't decide to be ignorant, we were cultured into it by design and it self-replicates as religion does by believing lies that make us reject conflicting evidence. "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit." "Yeah, that's a bad neighborhood. Those people don't know how to act civilized." Understanding is shut off. Complex things and environments are reduced to binary "facts". It's an illusion to think any person is different from another person in a meaningful way. Our actions are different because our culture is different, and we all think we are acting the right way, until the day we discover we are wrong and begin to act differently.
The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. At this point, these calamities feel familiar — so familiar, in fact, that their details have begun to echo each other.
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