Listening to all the blather on the radio about Ferguson & Louisville while driving home from the gig tonight, wanting to add some perspective... My brother was murdered by the police. He had no violent criminal record, just mentally ill and suicidal when a cop showed up at his door with a drawn weapon. The rage and helplessness I felt, and still feel, about his murder, the officer who committed the crime, and the way it was reported in the media is incomprehensibly deep and enduring. I see a community like Ferguson, living in de facto segregation, policed and persecuted by an entity that is racially, economically and geographically foreign to them and wonder: How many times has this happened? How many within that community have a father, brother, cousin, neighbor, friend who has been unlawfully harassed, assaulted, or murdered by the police? By protesting their condition, even lashing out in mindless violence, they are of course breaking the law. There is no right and proper way to obtain justice when it is the arbiters of law and order that are committing crimes against you, when the victims are systematically denied the educational and financial resources necessary to access the justice system. Many of our inner cities, segregated suburbs and projects are not unlike Gaza: cut off from all opportunity, the scope of their lives dictated by a foreign power that pushes them to the margins of society, then penalizes them for daring to subsist on those margins. If, in a hopeless rage, they march in the street or pick up a rock or a gun, then we unleash all the machines of death created by a trillion dollar industry of annihilation, and call it self-defense. I say it is not the duty of the oppressed to suffer and die quietly, within the limits of the law. It is the duty of the law, and the governments that enforce it, to ensure that people are not oppressed and suffering. To fail in this is to call into question the need or validity of both law and government, and so invoke anarchy. Ive more to say, but Ill leave it there for now...
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 06:28:52 +0000
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