Only around 3% of charged cases ever see the inside of a courtroom. This is what our right to a fair and speedy trial has become. Hundreds of thousands of people exist in cruel and unusual conditions, including the mind-breaking torture of solitary confinement. We are spied on with impunity by all levels of our government and managed like cattle for elections. Political protest is unsupported and meaningless. We are gerrymandered and sorted and isolated and indebted, and we look at the hapless unluckies that go to prison and imagine they somehow deserve their Hell on Earth. And there is no resistance. We just let our rights go, and hope the bad things happen to other people. I have watched this system chew through vets whose lives were destroyed for nothing at all. I have watched the environment raped with pollution and extraction, other peoples oppressed with our government’s blessing (and funding) and their countries plundered. I have spent my life watching police here murder and maim without accountability. Our intelligence agencies drain our economy on the pretense of protecting us from a nearly non-existent threat. At its worst, terrorism doesn’t get anywhere as close to hurting us as our working conditions, our prisons, our debts, our medical system, our own police, or our vast proclivity for killing ourselves. The American people have spent my whole life telling themselves stories that let them off the hook when it comes to being responsible wardens of our country and our world. And you’re still doing it. You’re even using my dead, beloved Aaron to do it, whom you let die. People love to say Aaron was a genius, and prodigy, and there’s no one like him. But he wasn’t. He just cared and believed in things and he let his care and his belief move his life. You could do that any day, any minute. https://medium/message/the-internets-own-boy-c815ae07a417
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 20:15:31 +0000