As a longtime civil rights activist, my heart warmed last week at the sight of so many passionate protesters rising up against injustice.
But sadly our vital highways and byways were shut down over a symptom of the police state rather than the disease itself. Only tangentially are we hearing complaints about the militarization of our local police. The military industrial complex has by now littered our planet with so much killing hardware that it is literally raining down onto our local cities and towns. Combine the influx of federal war toys with local police departments being pressured to give preferential hiring to returning war veterans and you get trouble. Now combine any bad-apple cop with a really bad day and add a pinch of PTSD and he or she is liable to abuse the first unlucky person who comes along. Black, white or purple.
Yet the complaint of these street protesters seems more about the skin color of militarization’s victims than about the militarization itself. It is almost as though these protesters would all go home happy if someone could simply prove to them that whites are victimized by police just as often as blacks are. The message seems to be that Big Government’s increasing brutality against the individual is justified as long as it’s meted out “fairly.”
By pointing out the colorblindness of militarization, do I downplay racism in the US? Not at all. Racism is still alive and well in many facets of our society, particularly in our court system, where blacks are far less likely to receive equal justice. It is no secret that the unconstitutional war on drugs has for decades served as fly paper for luring young blacks into the drooling maw of the prison industrial complex.
The establishment’s proposed “solution” of adding body cameras to militarized police costumes won’t guarantee justice. A smoking-gun video in New York did not guarantee justice for Eric Garner. The multiple videos of WTC7’s obvious controlled demolition did not guarantee justice after 9/11. In a police state, the state always wins. That is the point. And more executive orders from Washington dictating how best to run the militarization won’t restore our lost sense of local community policing and legal accountability. No, the solution, if it is to be effective, must come from we the people.
To solve our police brutality problems we must do more than just shut down our own roadways. We must show up en masse at our local government meetings and demand a return to genuine local community policing, without DoD goodies mucking up the works and destroying our trust. We must demand local legislation blocking NDAA indefinite detentions, which, just like the federal wars on drugs and terror, will surely victimize people of color disproportionately.
To the protesters I say stop blocking innocent drivers. Don’t become just another Occupy type movement that quickly fizzles out from lack of focus. If we truly want to effect equal justice, then let us start demanding anti-NDAA resolutions even in racially diverse cities like Worcester. Then this old civil rights activist will be impressed.
