Yesterday, Today - How About Tomorrow?

I have always had an aversion for cops.

I wrote about that aversion in my first book, Screen Saver, a memoir I published in 2008.

Throughout the book I included little stories about various cop encounters, all bad, that I have had over the years.

Here is the first one.

"The Hollywood Theater experience had been a particularly distasteful one for me because I had never liked cops.  The probable reason for this feeling, like so many attitudes, preferences and aversions I had in my life could be traced to my mother.  Sometime about the time of the birthday party I had been with my mother in our car.  She was going to pick up my father.  My father’s arrival at the car must have been imminent because my mother had stopped outside the place that he was going to come from.  There were cars filling the curbside locations where she would have parked, but since my father was apparently going to be right out, she had stopped in the street parallel to one of the parked cars to wait.

Suddenly there was a big fat guy in a blue suit and with a red face outside my mother’s side of the car motioning for her to roll down the window.  When she had rolled down the window he started yelling at her. I was probably between four and five years old.  One of the things he was yelling was “double-park”.  I have had a horror of both double parking and cops ever since.  I had had my first unpleasant cop experience."

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Over the years I began to notice that my black fellow citizens all had stories similar to mine, only different.

While my stories always ended up with me being unbelievably pissed off, their stories always ended up in police violence, mental and physical abuse, arrest, and, often, death; in the case of death the stories were always told by family or friends of the deceased.

Nothing much ever came of any of those stories.

But that was then.

Ubiquitous video recording capacity has allowed the truth of those stories to finally be documented beyond argument;  that has caused the truth and horror of those stories to register in the minds and souls of even the most obtuse among us.

One wonders why we had to wait until now for the incessantly documented with video murders to register in the minds of America.

But at least now it has happened.

Memorial Day 2020; Minneapolis Minnesota.

So we're in now, now.

Now the question seems to be (beware: "The Question" is being managed by the very "system" that brought us centuries of terror wrought upon the non white, non wealthy segment of America) "what are we going to do about it"?

The right answer to that question is crucial because anything less than the right answer will be terror as usual.

(Since the wrong answer would result in continuation of the "system" it would not seem unlikely that, once exonerated with the wrong answer, the "system", turgid with thoughts of revenge, would unleash terror of sort heretofore unimagined - kinda like donnie after ol' Mitch and the Boys lied him "not guilty".)

Here is the current system in a few words: the police have for a couple centuries been deployed to fend off any attempt by the non white, non rich population of the United States to exercise their rights as citizens and to get ahead in life and to ascend the ladder of success, wealth and achievement.

In current parlance, the cops are the guard dogs of the great gated community that is rich, white america.

In the case of black people the most expeditious means of fending them off and guarding the gates against them has been for the police to kill them.

That's the "system".

It is working perfectly.

That's why that system needs to be dismantled; it is, from the ground up a paid vigilante apparatus with the mission of allowing the economics and sociology of slavery to forever remain as the dominant component of America's DNA.

Defunding that system is the quickest way to dismantle it.

Anything other than dismantling the system would be terror as usual.