Thoughts on Ferguson. Our very own Arab Spring in the making? Maybe.

4 Comments

1. 

   Oui on August 19, 2014 at 1:55 pm

   An anthropologist should explain to me why in a world of freedon in movement, tribal instinct is returning as a nationalist movement. Fear for the unknown, outsiders, possessive, not willing to share fruits of the earth. I often wonder how indigenous peoples took that step to meet, confront another group, or made a choice between peace and war.  

   Self-Awareness of Self and Death  

   As humanity progress, humans were endowed with self-awareness and conscious self-reflection. This is necessary to ensure humans are aware of the greater dangers that are a threat to the suvival of the human specie.

   Unfortunately, self-awareness also make humans aware of their eventual unavoidable mortality. The awareness of one eventual death invokes the death anxiety and fears at the conscious and subconscious level to avoid death. This death anxiety at the extreme can bring a sense of fear and terror to the individual. For the majority, the death anxiety is programmed to cause unbearable uneasiness, terrific, horrifying painful feelings of fears and anxieties.

   It is part of human kind, but it appears we are sliding on a fast track backwards on the “human” part.

   I recall a film about tribes in Australian Papua New Guinea, a coordinated attempt to live side by side with another neighboring group. During the documentary, tides turned and a horrible slaughter ensued. A battle of Hutsis and Tutsis in micro-format.

   People in the U.S. want to defend their homestead just like the days of the [lawless] Wild West. If we don’t change drastically, it will be the Hatfield and McCoy feuds all over again with 21st century arms and dynamite.

   [In 50 BCE the Roman philosopher Lucretius wrote the epic poem On the Nature of Things]

2. 

   Oui on August 19, 2014 at 3:31 pm

   Found in my mailbox, thought provoking … so I like it!

   We’re Part of the Oppressive System That Killed Michael Brown By Jay Michaelson

   (The Forward) ‒ In many ways, it has always been like this. As long as there has been an American republic, there have been white men in power oppressing everyone else.

   And yet, it has never been so simple, either. “Intersectionality,” the understanding that multiple vectors of oppression — race, class, gender, etc. — often overlap, is a recent word, coined in 1989 by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. But it is an old concept. How old? Bible old. “Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor,” says Zechariah 7:10. Gender, class, race.

   A conflagration like Ferguson, Missouri, cannot be reduced to a single factor. It is a combination of racism, militarization, economic insecurity, the widening wealth gap, disenfranchisement, black rage, and God knows what else.

   Nor can it be reduced to a few bad guys. The issue is not whether Police Officer Darren Wilson is a racist or not. What matters is how he and Michael Brown are part of structures of racism and oppression that are far more powerful than any individual. Yes, Brown was shot six times by Wilson. But he was killed by a “bonfire of the vanities,” this tragic web of circumstances and power relationships that you and I are part of too.

   And if you and I are part of that web, then we, too, are implicated in the way in which structures of oppression continue to hurt the most vulnerable — whether the victims are unarmed black men on the streets of Staten Island or Missouri, or six-year-olds crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, or women whose bodies are controlled by men.

3. 

   Gaianne on August 21, 2014 at 3:03 am

   Ferguson seems to be partly funding its city government through excessive and pricey if mundane traffic citations–burned out tail-light, jay-walking, and the like.  A ticket for jay-walking can run well over $200 dollars.  

   The cops have long been trolling the black neighborhoods for revenue, and on average each black resident has been stopped more than once this year.  

   Unpaid fines result in arrest and more fines, and then jail time, and then more fines.  In a poor neighborhood this sort of thing is devastating.  

   Could this be fueling local emotions?  Just a thought.  

   –Gaianne  

   • 

     Arthur Gilroy on August 21, 2014 at 6:37 am

     Governmental criminality produces public resentment on every level, Gaianne. That’s what i have been writing about here for years. As above, so below. The picture you paint regarding Ferguson is just small-time grifting, but it is built on the same model as is the big-time grifting of the PermaGov. Control by fear, wealth collection as part of the fear system. Eventually the scammers overestimate their possibilities and one or another kind of revolution occurs. Riots in the street are the same whether they occur in Cairo or in Ferguson. The only difference is one of scale. The control system reaction is the same, too. Armed reaction backed by massive propaganda about how sorry they are that it happened. And then they find another way to grift. A new dictator, a new mayor, a new president. Same same. Same old story all dressed up in new clothes.

     Watch.

     Controllers don’t give up their scam easily, and if they do there’s always a new set of controllers waiting in the wings.

     Control.

     The real “oldest profession.”

     Watch.

     AG