“Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” – Coretta Scott King
This year continues to remind us Covid19 isn’t the only problem ravaging our country. Near the beginning of NY pausing, a meme was making the rounds bemoaning “citizens” being locked up while “criminals” were being sent home. This annoyed me for a few reasons:
- Memes are fine for funny observations or inspirational sayings, but a bad way to address important issues compared to expressing an original (and, ideally, well informed) thought. They’re like the bumper stickers of the internet.
- “Criminals” don’t lose citizenship. It’s a propaganda technique meant to dehumanize people and manipulate emotions.
- We’ve been asked to shelter in place to protect people’s lives and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, not as a punishment. No guards have been stationed outside our homes. We’re not even confined to our homes.
- Nonviolent offenders were placed under house arrest to ease jail populations, both for their health and safety (a right they still have) and for the health and safety of employees.
- Not everybody should be in jail for as long as they are, if at all, and some people should be in jail that aren’t.
At the time, I thought of a seemingly endless parade of affluent young men receiving little to no consequence for rape, including one who was even caught in the act by two men, and another who filmed himself in the act. Or the drunk driver who killed people, and whose lawyer successfully defended him claiming “affluenza”; a lifelong lack of consequences used as a defense to perpetuate the cycle!
I also thought of all the less affluent people arrested and held indefinitely because they can’t post bail or their civil rights are ignored. Several years ago Kalief Browder was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack and sent to Rikers for three years without a trial, two of those years in solitary confinement. He tried to put his life back together after his wrongful imprisonment but ultimately committed suicide. All over a backpack that may or may not have been stolen.
Compare that with the cop caught on camera killing George Floyd. He kneeled on the neck of a man in handcuffs for about eight minutes while his coworkers prevented onlookers from interfering. Floyd stopped moving after the first five minutes. He wasn’t just denied due process. He was executed in the street. His killer has finally been arrested as I write this, but only for 3rd degree murder, and only after extensive public outcry.
Since Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down and killed by white supremacists (who have at least been charged, if not yet convicted) and Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed (charges against her husband have been dropped, but no charges have been brought against her killer), some have tried reverse engineer cases against them, as if anything could justify their deaths.
Nothing happened to armed white supremacists threatening violence over haircuts but people peacefully protesting murder were sprayed with tear gas (and this was before riots). The same people that consider masks and sheltering in place oppression don’t mind the president sharing a video saying the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat on Twitter, or inciting violence. That I even typed that blows my mind, but this is the reality decisions motivated by greed or hate (and, for some, the “LOLs”) have wrought.
All this amidst a continuing pandemic that has worsened in places opening too recklessly. If those protesting masks are so desperate to draw tenuous parallels to slavery, they need look no further than an economic adviser referring to people as human capital stock.
Stock.
Like livestock.
And, weirdly, the people resisting being treated as livestock get called sheep (because nothing indicates independent thinking like slinging around the same insults as all the other independent thinkers).
Honestly, the past few months feel like a greatest hits compilation of the worst moments in the past 100 years or so of US history. At one of my more naive moments in childhood, I felt relief most major battles had been fought and won. The reality is we have to remain vigilant. History only ends when we do.
“You do not finally win a state of freedom that is protected forever. It doesn’t work that way.” – Coretta Scott King
