Most people want to get back to the “normal” that prevailed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but others are looking at the police and the murder of George Floyd. They are still killing people of color, just as they always have.
If Nothing Else, the Cops Are Still “Normal”
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The new normal doesn’t apply to just the cops. In about three more days all of this will die down, and we’ll be right back at the status quo ante. Just like always. (Unless, somehow, everyone has finally arrived at my level of anger.)
My big complaint? Not the cops. I can’t expect the cops to change. They’re too stunted. The bad cops murder, and the even worse cops allow it to happen and assist in the coverups. Change won’t come from them.
The media? Nope. Also too stunted.
My problem is the protesters. Here’s an example. Two lawyers got nabbed for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police cruiser. The New York Times identified them as Urooj Rahman, a human rights lawyer, and Colinford King Mattis, a Princeton graduate who works (probably going to be changed shortly to worked) at a midsize legal firm.
Two highly educated people whose services would be invaluable and immediately needed chose to voluntarily line up to throw themselves pointlessly into the shredding mechanism of the system. The prison sentence for the crime they are accused of is five years at a minimum. Disbarment is quite possible, too.
And they’re lawyers; they know exactly how brutal the system is. They aren’t college kids acting like college kids. They’re worse. They’re grown-ass adults who want to pretend to be protesters. This isn’t “High Noon,” and neither of you is Gary Cooper.
Sigh.
To the best of my knowledge, the protesters have not organized a voter registration drive, they have not urged a boycott or applied any sort of economic leverage, and are not likely to. It’s Occupy Wall Street all over again.
George Floyd was murdered, in broad daylight, in front of many witnesses, and, yet again, everyone somehow thinks that just being angry, just marching a couple of times, just shouting a few slogans, is going to change that and that such flaccid participation means anything in the first place.
The things I could do if I could get people to listen to me for half an hour.
Voting is as effective as the bull that charges against the matador’s cape.
Occupy Wall Street is back again with a vengeance.
Extreme Wealth, Extreme Poverty, Extreme Insecurity, and Extreme Security Surveillance, Extreme Weapon Systems, Extreme Capacity for Murder, Extreme Indifference, Extreme Hate, Extreme Incarceration, Extremist Nation.
Once in a while, the bull gores the matador, sometimes fatally. And my goodness, do I cheer for the bull when that happens.
Voting doesn’t work much of the time because people have been too easily distracted: Identity Politics does that. Instead of fighting for everyone, everyone is fighting just for their small slice. Tomorrow’s June 2, and a whole bunch of states are voting. I wonder, most sincerely, if any of the protesters have realized that the most effective thing they can do is to vote for Bernie Sanders. If they want social justice, they aren’t getting it from “you ain’t black” Biden.
If it’s not on the ballot it cannot be effectively voted for.
Bernie Sanders has zero chance of winning.
The two party system is effectively an Oligarchic Corporatocracy, not a democracy and not a social democracy.
Nothing can change for the better if the nature of the beast remains concealed.
In some places this grim event might put end to long police choke holds but that still leaves shootings, excessive use of batons, tassers and whole bus load of other problems, then you have the whole issue of the court system: who gets charged, the severity of the charges, bail…….. ect.
The fires and looting will led many metro police department to beef up their riot squads until they look like the army, even into towns had only peaceful small protests.
P.S.Some of the police would have mask
Why isn’t it no wonder that a chauvinist president would embolden a namesake Chauvin?
George Floyd was killed during an arrest for forgery, so the news reports.
But the banksters forgery with automated robo-signing was a crime that did not foreclose bailouts of the banks by the white chauvinist Obama.
Just because one is technically black does not prevent a technically black man from being a white chauvinist, one like Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison who declines to see any intent on behalf of Derek Chauvin in the third degree murder charge (which he will allow to stand) in the murder of George Floyd.
Frederick Douglass wrote of fights between slaves over whose master was most powerful. Has education of not progressed at all since the pre-Civil War era among the Congressional Black Caucus?
And the looting of communities by corporate monopolies goes unnoticed when done by well fed white chauvinists because it was done to increase wealth rather than to ameliorate the pains of poverty inflicted upon workers displaced by monopolies like Walmart.
It’s revealed that the emperor does not know yet that he has no clothes; nor can the emperor see murder.
USA: bringing you exquisitely EXCEPTIONAL genocidal racism since 1609.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose….
Henri
I beg to differ: The more it “changes”, the worse it gets.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. — Oscar Wilde
I fear that someone has taken an axe to Dorian Gray’s portrait and that he’s now been revealed in all his unspeakable ugliness – on the other hand, even previously one didn’t have to look too closely to discover the countenance behind the cosmetics….
Henri