This post comes to you in three parts.
Part I: Ferguson police are arresting journalists
Don’t get me wrong the murder of a black man was bad enough, but now, one
has to ask. What the fuck are the Ferguson police doing where they feel
compelled to arrest journalists? At least two
reporters were arrested and then released without charge: Wesley Lowery
from the Washington Post and Ryan J. Reilly from the Huffington Post. I’m
guessing that the mass response to social media posts about journalists being
arrested might have something to do with this.
Swat teams were called in to deal with the protesters, and they entered
McDonalds where the two reporters were working. The reporters went offline at
5pm, which is when other journalists started tweeting that two journalists had
been arrested. LA Times reporter than began investigating the arrests. After 45
minutes Lowery and Reilly came back online. You can read Lowery’s
version of events here.
There is something truly horrifying that the police can arrest
journalists and meet with no consequences.
Part II: I disagree with Senator Warren
<blockquote
class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">This is
America, not a war zone. The people of href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ferguson?src=hash">#Ferguson
just want answers. We all want answers.— Elizabeth Warren
(@elizabethforma) href="https://twitter.com/elizabethforma/statuses/499904279961149440">August
14, 2014</blockquote>
Perhaps I’m a
cynic, but America is a war zone. We’re just not used to seeing it on
television because the war on drugs and the war on terror don’t really look
like anything different than the status quo which is the brutalization of
people of color and the low income. A lot of people on Twitter are drawing
comparisons between Ferguson and the 1960s, specifically the Civil Rights
Movement in the south. But this didn’t happen overnight. Slowly with the
stripping of voters rights, the limitations on women’s rights, drug policy,
racial profiling, we’ve slipped further and further back. We live in a
militarized police state, when the police have access to tanks, then we live in
a war zone. You can access a list of people killed by the police via
Wikipedia, which is obviously a flawed source, but with news coming out
that New Orleans’ police covered up a police shooting, coupled with the murders
in Ohio, California, and Missouri, it is better than nothing.
Part III: This is
our future or how did we get here
In case you’re
confused the Ferguson Police have tanks because of the war on drugs and the war
on terror. Sen. Warren, want to tell me again about how we’re not at war? See
the local police forces got extra money to combat drugs and then terror. They
put it to use by providing local police with better armor than the military. In
Ferguson specifically, the military gave them military grade weapons.
We’re watching the
police’s unreasonable response to lawful protests. This is what protesting
looks like now, we got a glimpse of it during Occupy. Notably, the protesters
unlawfully arrested at Occupy in New York sued, and they have been winning. While
clearly, I’m opposed to the tactics being used against protesters, seeing some
of these photos makes me wonder what civilians abroad must be thinking. I know
survivors in Gaza have been sending tips to the Ferguson protesters on how to
deal with the tear gas.
We’re here because
for a long time society said it was ok to kill unarmed black people. Maybe this
is the first step in issuing consequences for the senseless kill of people of
color. However, the cynic in me doubts it. I think we’re revert right back to
the way things were after this. I think the racists will be in full fear mode,
and people of color will be even more disenfranchised. I know the Governor has
decided to remove local police, but I’m not sure if that is going to be an
improvement or if even better armed law enforcers will be deployed.
