In which you could learn a thing or two about how "policing" works in Baltimore. Or, in which you could learn who the other "thugs" are.

Way too many people across the internet think they can accurately and justifiably levy blame on parents, kids, criminals, communities, rioters, etc., all the while granting massive, unquestioning benefit-of-the-doubt to the police. Decades of brutal and unconstitutional policing in Baltimore is just as much a part of the equation here.

I'd run, too, if I lived in this shit show. I'd riot when the anger, fear, rage, and hate boiled to the surface after yet another man met his last day on earth at the hands of the authorities. I wouldn't tell my kids they have nothing to fear if they just obey the law. I wouldn't tell my spouse they have nothing to fear if they just comply with the police. I wouldn't feel safe and secure when I saw a cop. I wouldn't feel comfortable knowing I "have nothing to hide". I wouldn't judge the guy I see with a rap sheet when I know that rap sheet was built from arrests by cops who get paid overtime for arrests, who aren't subjected to any rigorous accountability, who get to invent "probable cause". I wouldn't sit around smugly thinking those who are victimized by abuses of power "must have deserved it". I certainly wouldn't dare judge with ignorant superiority people who live in a shit-hole where drugs and crime are how one survives. I would know the cops can't be trusted--I'd see it every day of my whole life.

And yet few try to understand having to live like that. They judge from white skin on comfortable suburban couches and fancy phones in nice neighborhoods that have not been brutalized by badges for decades.

Understand the way you see and experience life and the world around you has nothing at all to do with the way life is or even can be for anybody else. Understand that your experiences in life do not in any way translate to being actual, persistent properties of reality everywhere. Understand life in middle-class white America, and all the privilege that comes with it and protects you, doesn't in any way translate to the existence experienced by others elsewhere. Hell, it might not even translate to the existence of those in your own neighborhood.

Or, you know, don't bother to understand it. That's your choice. But do the nation and the victims of these horrid conditions a solid, and just don't speak about what people who live in areas infested by unaccountable and tyrannical brutal cops should do when another person they know is arrested with a high probability of bogus "probable cause". Or charged with fabricated crimes to serve a political and social agenda. Or beaten and otherwise abused unnecessarily--but, of course, after the officer has yelled the appropriate ass-covering phrases that make all the white people think they couldn't possibly be bullshitting or abusing their power. Or killed. Or all of the above.

Remember the 60s, when white people saw horrific violence on their TVs, and it shocked them out of their decades-long stupor and prompted them to get off their asses, and get into the streets with those who were being brutalized by badges? They didn't sit back and tell themselves the people on the bridge in Selma were asking for it. They didn't say the victims must have deserved it. They didn't excuse the police brutality. It sucks to say it, but that was a turning point moment that legitimized the civil rights struggle in the national consciousness in a way that had not been so before. The brutality was televised, and the people woke up.

In a nation built on and for privilege, shit doesn't change much until those with privilege stand up.

Another man died at the hands of the police. His life was extinguished by something they did. He's never going to draw another breath, while those responsible for his death still breathe. There are people who love him who will never see him again. Never hold him again. Never hug him. Never kiss him. Never pat him on the back. Never hear his thoughts.

Our moral compasses are completely fucked when meaningless, inanimate, material shit being damaged and destroyed ranks as a higher concern more worthy of conversation and cameras than yet another man's life being taken with impunity by those with a badge.