I keep coming back to Sandra Bland.
I’m as distraught and depressed as most everyone else, but I’m taking some very cold comfort from the fact that it has always been like this. As author William Gibson stated, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
I’m not the first to point out that the Declaration of Independence’s famous basis, that all men are created equal, was not a statement of truth from it’s author – who legally owned many other people – but a poetic aspiration that we have yet to take on. One of my favorite poets – Langston Hughes – ended a poem with the statement “America will be!”
I have long considered it a light at the end of the tunnel, but that tunnel feels longer and darker now than it ever has before.
You might not know that the United States has more people in more prisons than any other nation in the world ever has. We currently have more people in prison than Stalin had in the gulags. Depending on who you know and how you know them, you might not realize that is already authoritarianism.
That’s before we even add in the illegal concentration camps in El Salvador and South Sudan, or anyone who has been grabbed off the street since the beginning of June.
In recent years, Americans were given a big wake up call via cell phone video that it is not at all unusual anywhere in this country for black people to be shot by police. Many Americans kind thought we had that problem solved; we do not.
I keep coming back to Sandra Bland. A woman who was seemingly murdered for not using her left turn signal. Bland was pulled over for an alleged traffic violation on July 10, 2015 by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia. Her less than submissive attitude resulted in her arrest, and she was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, on July 13.
Enrique Lozano, who was grabbed off the street in front of Resurrection Church, in Culver City, cannot even be considered a pretexual traffic stop gone wrong.
The strangely persistent idea that this violence is the work of a “few bad actors” must be let go of for good. This is what the system is designed to do. Our country has a solid history of murdering and imprisoning people of color for no reason other than their complexions. No, no, you think, it has not been this bad…it has never been this bad.
Well, that depends on who you are.
Just about everyone I know in the LA area has – at least a handful or more than a hundred people – in their lives for whom they are now – right now – afraid for their physical safety.
You probably had fewer people who you thought might die from the COVID virus.
If the feds did a sweep of my neighborhood, and based solely on complexion, just grabbed people and threw them in prison, likely half of my neighbors would be gone. People who have lived here for decades, people with six figure incomes, people who are new parents, people who have felt safe and at home here. That seems to be the standard – legal, not legal, papers or no papers – if you are a person with a dark complexion, you are a target.
And I keep coming back to Sandra Bland.
So, people getting grabbed off the street? It’s an escalation, that’s for sure, but it’s not new.
The murder of Mark and Melissa Hortman, that’s an escalation. The death of a Canadian citizen, Johnny Noviello, while in ICE custody in Florida, that’s an escalation. Arresting elected officials for trying to check in on their constituents in custody? That’s an escalation.
I listen to people parroting Project 2025 propaganda at council meetings, and I wonder where they left off the use of their own minds to just become zombies repeating Republican talking points. Full confession- I hate talking points, and I want everyone to use their own words, to say whatever they need to say. Using someone else’s pre-packaged sloganeering sentences means you are not speaking as an individual, you are reporting for volunteer work as a a bot.
It was just about ten years ago that Bland was ‘found’ hanged in her jail cell. Like that other guy in New York who is all over the news. And who knows how many individuals whose names we might never discover.
Over to Langston Hughes,
“Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
In some places, unevenly distributed, the future is growing hydroponic food, teaching linguistics and dancing barefoot in the grass.
Today, I will use my left turn signal, and keep going. America will be. Poetry is here all the time, for everyone. America will be.
Photo courtesy Pixus Drones
