Galvanic Ink

Imagine a scenario with me:

You are walking down the street when you hear a ton of commotion just around the corner. Screaming, yelling, crying, pleading, etc.. You round the corner to see 50 people encircled widely around another, more terrifying scene. A young black man stood apart from sever police officers. They have their weapons pointed at the young man, shouting at him to drop his weapon. He keeps yelling back that he doesn’t have a weapon.

You can hear the terror in his voice. You can clearly see that he is carrying only a cell phone in his hand. The officers keep threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t drop his weapon. The bystanders are all screaming at the police to calm down. They exclaim that the man is trying to cooperate, but the officers just won’t listen. They never listen. After a while, the officers seem to get emotionally exhausted before loading up their squad cars and leaving.

It’s not hard to imagine, because it’s so god damned common. The only unbelievable part of the story is that the police left without anyone being shot. But this exact situation happened in Seattle. Here‘s a link to it. There are more videos like this posted around the internet than I will ever have the time to watch. It’s easy to watch this scenario unfold and ask yourself ‘why do the police act like this?’ But I guess it’s just my weird nature to look at the bystanders and ask ‘Why are you just standing there?’

When Michael Brown, George Floyd and countless other men, women and children of ANY color are publicly held at gunpoint, wrongfully arrested, injured or killed by police, you can find a dozen people filming the incident, posting it online and saying “Look, the police are being the bad guys again! Let’s hate them! Let’s rally together and let them know we hate them!” But when you ask them about reforming the police or changing the system, what’s their response? “Well, yeah, I support that. Somebody else had better get on that, because we’re sick of this!”

Do not mistake my words, it’s very likely that I hate the police more than you do, but when did becoming a ‘person of action’ turn into being ‘a person who yells for other people to fix things’? Why didn’t every single bystander hold up their empty hands and walk slowly between the police and the person they were bullying? Why didn’t the people come together and shield Michael Brown or George Floyd when they were brutally murdered by police? Why do we stand by when injustice is being so gallantly flaunted?

Fear.

They have us so afraid to do anything. Not because we are worried that it might not work. But because it might work and it still won’t matter. If the people in Seattle were to stand in between that unarmed man and the police, shielding him from their unjust cruelty rather than yelling at the police to leave, the police still might have left. But they would have come back the next day and arrested everyone in the neighborhood for obstruction of justice, interfering with an investigation or whatever bullshit charges they could have trumped up to make themselves look like the victims.

We might be afraid that this action would make the situation worse, but we are more afraid to make it the situation go away and lead to everyone being bullied with actual charges.

These laws aren’t put in place to protect people. They are specifically designed to punish people who try to force the police or any other authority to holding themselves accountable for their excessive force. If we try to step up, they will arrest us. But we have to ask ourselves five simple questions: Yeah? And? So? What? The fuck do I care?

Arrest us. Take us all in. People are afraid of being arrested for a variety of reasons, but that’s a topic for a different discussion. Right now, let’s just focus on the most important topic: stopping the injustice. We only accomplish this by standing up for what is right. And that means more than making a Facebook post or wearing a shirt that says ‘I Can’t Breathe’. If everyone watching George Floyd be choked to death in the street had walked to the police and told  Derek Chauvin to get off his neck, what would have happened? Those people may have been arrested, but George Floyd may have survived.

It might seem like fearmongering to insist that any interaction with police could very well be one that leads to a death, but if we have learned anything from the countless wrongful deaths by police officers that have come to light over the past several years, it very well COULD mean that. And we have to remember that they can arrest us, but they can’t arrest all of us.

Peaceful protesting has it’s place, but that place has been at the end game for far too long. We can no longer stand by while we are being slaughtered, only to protest the outcome. We have to perform preventative maintenance. Stopping a situation before someone is killed needs to be more important to us than spending a few days in jail. And if you’re the type of person who thinks you just couldn’t possibly survive a few nights in jail, let me referr to you to the the aformentioned five questions. Your comfort means less to me than a terrified young man with guns being pointed at his head.

If I were ever so lucky as to watch an injustice such as this, right in front of me, I would hold my hands out to my sides, walk between the man and his bullies. I would say nothing. I would respond to nothing. I would just stand there knowing that I was standing up for the bullied. But also, knowing that I was standing up for myself.