I need to keep going with this because it’s impossible not to. If you don’t appreciate me getting political, you’ve got the wrong writer, friend…lets get you to the door. These protesting students inspire me.
Let’s prepare for the eventuality that one of these students protesting gets killed by a police officer or soldier. I’m not going to be shocked when it happens, and anyone who is shocked doesn't really know who we’re dealing with here. Odds are it’s going to be a black protester, just to keep the police on brand with their storied legacy.
I get the feeling that we are at the precipice for serious unrest, like when we bombed Cambodia beyond recognition in 1969. Which coincidentally led to 4 Kent state students being gunned down by the national guard.
“cuz summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy” — Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man”
Seriously…Once I move closer to the subway and have some coin to get past the turn style (the national guardsmen at the station compel me to avoid hopping it), I feel the need to go join these people. After all, I want to be able to live with myself when i’m older, and know that I at least tried.
My mother reminded me that my grandfather lost his job as a professor, wherever he was in 1969 for his antiwar views and protesting, and that man taught me everything as a kid. if you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll be familiar with Opie. I know he’d be positively mortified with the state of affairs in the country, and writing letters to various newspaper editors, much better than any of the corporate garbage they churn out and try to pass as impartial news. I spent a great deal of time just wondering how he’d deal with the whole trump thing, but I guess he got out (of earthly existence) in time.
I don’t read as much as any writer really should, and that’s on me, but Hunter S. Thompson is a literary hero. I cant help but feel the disillusionment and loss of hope that Hunter got from the Nixon presidency, and the Vietnam War. Honestly, I think the American experiment is in need of a “page one rewrite”, because the plot sucks, the characters suck, and there isn’t much about the system that’s at all worth saving.
I’m sure that if i’m not already on one, that this will put me on a watchlist of some sort, but I think heads need to roll. I don’t think we are going to petition and tweet our way out of a capitalist police state, sorry. I don’t know of any peaceful revolutions that made any meaningful change.
We object to our government murdering tens of thousands of innocent people so that rich white colonialists can build condominiums on their graves, but we’ve got to be orderly and peaceful about it? I dunno, Jack…. seems kind of unfair to me.
People are murdered by the police all of the time, they sit in jail cells for years or even decades for nonviolent crimes directly resulting from systemic failures that are built into the way this nation functions (100% by design, might I add) . We are criminalizing the poverty and homelessness that are caused by our very economic model even more drastically than we already had. Yet, even peaceful protests are met with more brutality. clearly, the time is right for fighting in the street, boy.
