Black Lives Matter.

After reading and thinking about other people’s thoughts and ideas on how to fix this- Here’s some stuff that will maybe get me canceled but hear me out. We have a race problem no doubt, but especially after seeing all of these horrific police videos, we clearly also have(and have always had) a police problem. They are intertwined and also separate. This is maybe something like what the “I don’t see color” people are trying to say even though it just comes off as racist.. Institutional racism also doesn’t see color. Sadly I think we need police. There are too many mfers I don’t trust out there to not have them and we don’t want right wing 2nd amendment nra militia dudes doing the policing for us. Evil is in the world, as we have seen many times, and not just in our government and the greed of the ruling class. Rapists, scammers, con people, human traffickers, hackers, identity thiefs, deed pirates(?) etc...Most “crime” however, probably even in some of these instances, is not a product of evil. First, we need better cops, and better policing. Cops who can think, assess, empathize, help people, and can uphold justice, who don’t beat the shit out of people and uh, don’t see color. We need anti violence policies and more conflict de-escalation training, way way more. We need cops to protect and serve everyone and not just the rich and powerful. We need an extremely high standard to serve as an officer of the law because it is a VERY hard job. We need to be able to respect them so they can respect us. We need to be able to hold them accountable but also we need to be able to understand when they make a mistake because it is not fair to expect someone to never make a mistake. Unfortunately police mistakes cost lives. Some of us probably have family who have been on the force, my great grandfather was apparently a cop in NYC and died from an injury he got while on duty, hopefully he wasn’t an asshole but thats totally irrelevant. I’ve had plenty of encounters with shitty cops, in many of which, no make that every single one, I definitely benefitted from my white privilege and I can’t recall ever being physically assaulted in any way. If I was black in those situations, I would almost certainly have ended up in prison or maybe dead. I’ve also met some really nice cops, some POC, while working in the DA’s office and other jobs, who just deal with horrible shit all of the time but still manage to be sweet positive people. I think this is what some of the “all lives matter” people are trying to say even though it is extremely dismissive and disrespectful of institutional racism black people face every day- none of us truly understand what being a cop is like in these times, and there has been a lot of reform(effective or not) in the past decade or so. Even that asshole in Montgomery County, I can almost see where he’s coming from, but he is a fascist turd and definitely part of the problem. I’m not trying to be a pig apologist and the ACAB people are totally justified, but have you met all cops? To quote Boots Riley: “The only way for cops to feel like they are doing the right thing- the only way for them to function in their job- is for them to subscribe to racist notions of violence, crime, and poverty- even if the cop themselves is Black or POC.” We need social justice and prison reform. We need to prosecute the crimes of the ruling class. We need to decriminalize addiction and poverty. We need mental health treatment. Then we need to divert resources currently going to brutalizing citizens forced into those crimes for other things like libraries, schools(start teaching about race in america early on), arts, science, healthcare, etc. We need real leadership and not a tyrant idiot going on and on about “law and order” aka more police brutality, institutional racism, poverty and thus crime. We need to give these cops a better chance to not make a mistake. We need to thank them for the sacrifices they make and for putting their lives on the line to protect people and for improving communities when they engage with them the right way. We need to end police brutality. We need to end militarization against citizens. We need to fix the problems that cause police brutality and we need to not blame all cops for those problems. We need to recognize that minorities are victims in this society that forces police to victimize them, and we need to end that. We need justice for George Floyd, Freddie Gray and Breonna Taylor and all the rest whose lives were taken so tragically and neglectfully and we need these incidents to stop happening so frequently that we can barely keep track or take note of them. Of course we need to educate ourselves and vote, in local and national elections. I honestly don’t know how we can end racism which is REAL and scary and sad, so we just need to rally together against it, often, and say it, just fucking say it: BLACK LIVES MATTER- and do our part in confronting it and addressing it in ourselves(I have) and our friends and families, keep an open mind and LISTEN to the voices of minorities, LGBTQ, etc...until one day it eventually dies out. Whatever we do we gotta do it right now. And a lot of white people are probably thinking hey, I exist, I matter and I have a voice too which is true, but our voices don’t really matter right now. Though I do hope some folks have read this wether they are white, black, men women, red, blue, or whatever in between. Why do I feel like I have said all this before?