[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]B[/dropcap]reaking down the contrasting mindsets of apologists for killer cops as opposed to those outraged by their brutal actions.
It comes down to this: Does one identify with and/or benefit from hyper-authoritarian power or does one empathize with the plight of the powerless? From Wounded Knee to The Middle Passage, from Apartheid-brutalized South Africa, from Dachau to Zionist Occupied Palestine to the anguish-seized streets of Ferguson, it is the same story, and same sort of personalities who populate the tale.
[quote]you are serving a life sentence
for crimes committed against you[/quote]It is a story involving the transformation of the human into the humane, and thereby holding firm to the torn and tattered fabric of one’s humanity.
White people: Don’t start grousing to me about your moral aversion to looting. The hours of one’s life can be looted. This is one of the neoliberal criminal enterprises most pernicious modus operandi. Hours upon hours of the lives of the low-wage, defacto slaves who labor to produce consumer state mammon are looted by the soul-depleting, time-sucking process.
Capitalist criminals loot everything in their greed-besotted path. The entire planet is a riot-zone where they are free to pillage and burn, sans consequence. Chances are, they have looted your life of resonance and meaning. They have made off with your heart and mind and left you believing you are merely a debt slave/consumer.
You have been robbed of your dignity. You aid and abet the crime on every occasion that you evince your white privilege by acting as an apologist for Jim Crow 2.0. by parroting palaver about “ghetto thugs” and “reverse racism.”
Traumatized, you stand gibbering at the perpetual crime scene known as your life within the corporate/consumer state paradigm. You have become an unreliable witness to the crime. You have made a blindfold out of yellow crime scene tape.
Your own words have ossified into a prison wherein you are serving a life sentence for crimes committed against you. At this point only self-awareness, empathy, and imagination can set you free.
Remember, you are warden, guard, and prisoner.
Illustration by Dan Booth not to be reproduced without his express prior permission
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
