Every revolution begins with a single act of defiance – Mahatma Gandhi
We’ve come full circle. Colin Kaepernick, whose simple act of kneeling to peacefully protest the murder of Black men and women by brutal American police so enraged white corporate America that he was blackballed by the NFL, is finally on the road back.
Kaepernick had a five-hour workout with the Las Vegas Raiders on Thursday, which reportedly went well, though no deal is imminent for the 34-year-old quarterback who has been deprived of earning a living in the NFL for six years.
At the same time, we’re seeing white America finally having the horrible epiphany that maybe Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter and the police/prison abolitionists were right all along.
The revelation comes after seeing the brutal thugs who work as agents of the state handcuff the parents of children being murdered in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday.
Texas Department of Safety director Steven McCraw led a rage-inducing press conference on Friday. He said the onsite police commander made the determination that it had changed from an active shooter situation to a barricade situation and that he had more time to get the keys to the classroom where students were locked in. Meanwhile, 19 local police officers — “good guys with guns” — were in the hallway as students were calling 911 begging for the police to help them. At 12:21 p.m., according to McCraw, three shots could be heard over the 911 call. But the classroom wasn’t breached until 12:50 p.m. when Border Patrol entered and killed the shooter.
Sometime while this was going on, police entered the school to rescue their own kids at the same time that their fellow officers were brutalizing parents outside the school. What better microcosm of America’s institutionalized policies of unequal treatment.
As Kaepernick once said:
People are dying in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up as far as, you know, giving freedom and justice and liberty to everybody.
The other details are somewhat unclear because the official police account keeps changing dramatically.
It went from a school resource officer was shot by the gunman to an officer engaged the gunman but didn’t exchange fire. On Thursday, we learned from DPS regional director Victor Escalon that none of that happened.
“It was reported that a school district police officer confronted the suspect that was making entry,” Escalon said. “Not accurate. He walked in unobstructed.”
Incredible and galling but not at all surprising. The most important thing to remember while dealing with cops is that POLICE LIE ALL THE TIME.
The police had the gunman pinned down in a classroom — a classroom full of children — and stopped parents from trying to rush into the school. Or, alternatively, the gunman barricaded inside the school for an hour before police confronted him.
The grief-stricken parents were horrified that the police were not doing anything to stop the mass murder. Not doing anything to stop violence. Why? Because that’s not the job of the police.
America spends $71 billion a year on police and prisons. They have not been defunded in the slightest. Police do not have a legal duty to protect you. This has been litigated numerous times, including at the travesty of justice we call the Supreme Court. Police are under no obligation to stop crime even if they see it.
This isn’t a new thing. Police were on the scene at Columbine in 1999, but it took three hours before they went into the school. School resource officer Scot Peterson didn’t enter the building in the 2018 Parkland School shooting.
We’re also now learning that the Buffalo shooter was in a fascist white supremacist chatroom with a retired federal agent who may have had 30 minutes advance notice of the planned murder spree.
So far, police in schools have not succeeded in stopping a mass shooting spree, but they have certainly kept the school to prison pipeline going.
Since Kaepernick last played in the NFL, it feels as though we’ve suffered a never-ending cycle of horrific violence and oppression, whether it’s a pandemic that killed 1 million people, the scourge that was the presidency of Donald Trump; a doddering old Joe Biden in the White House calling for regime change for a nuclear-armed rival power, and states banning the teaching of racism in America while finding new ways to restrict voter rights.
And as shocking and horrifying as all of it has been, nothing is as huge as the privileged population being unplugged from the Matrix and seeing the ruthless unending cycle of capitalism and its inherent evils.
The issue of gun control has been argued for decades, but too many politicians are still owned by the NRA. It’s not just Republicans; on the same day as the horrific shooting that left 19 children dead, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic establishment secured a victory for anti-abortion, A-rated by the NRA Congressman Henry Cuellar. Let’s not forget the greatest advocate of “just shoot them in the leg” and “Fund the Police”: President Biden. Certainly massive gun control reform is needed (and the Second Amendment can go fuck itself).
But we also need to address why our society produces so many twisted young men, most of them sexually repressed and misogynistic.
All of this points to a nation deranged and sick at its very core.
We need deep fundamental change and a re-examination of the American misery machine. What we’ll get is probably more money for cops, more weapons sent all over the world while we can’t feed babies or keep them safe.
The police are not heroes, despite what massive amounts of Hollywood copaganda tells you. They protect the property of the rich elites. They’re there to keep the masses and worker drones in line and keep the prison industrial complex going. Maybe it’ll be different this time. Probably not, but maybe people will reconsider Colin Kaepernick and what he was kneeling for.