The west coast sweep, apparently a well orchestrated and illegal conspiracy by those municipalities, appeared to begin in Seattle, Washington … in a camp where two people were killed on the same evening of the mayor’s announcement.
Donald Trump has not uttered one racist word during his campaign, and yet black people are attacking rallies as though he were David Duke.
The problem that intelligent and well-informed people face in Alabama, is that there are still plenty of rural places tucked away up in the holler where Johnny still hasn’t traveled farther from home than he has to go to fetch a bucket of water from the well. Even though this observation is quite literally true, it is just as unfortunate that it is also metaphorically true, and so extends to what otherwise appears to be “normal” people living in places like Huntsville. The fact is, the South ain’t gonna “rise again” in the sense that seems to motivate the cretins – that South simply don’t exist, that South was an entirely different animal whose politics and plantations are extinct.
I believe in the American dream, not the American delusion. If you were to examine the war crimes of Bashar al-Assad, who is little more than the mayor of a large American city, could you really tell the difference, conceptually, between his tactics and the ones outlined in the New York Times story? I certainly can’t. We are not yet in an all out war in this country, but if law enforcement is allowed to disregard constitutional values because they say they have cornered some bad guys, where will they stop if they hold an extremist sectarian view like Kim Davis and the TEA Party zealots? When do their tactics become enforcement of their agenda instead of legitimate law?
In the months since Ferguson, we have seen countless police shoot and kill unarmed (black) men, and virtually the entire country has stated that the consistent excessive use of force is not ok. And yet, the response from law enforcement has been the same old excuses. Oh sure, under enormous public pressure, they did some restructuring in Ferguson. But everywhere else from New York, to Cleveland, and even Huntsville, the law enforcement response has been totally wrong, and totally lacking in contrition.
Really, for all the circus posturing, I see the red flags flying over the big tent that say – hay, wait a minute, this is a free election in the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and they want to eliminate the most popular of presidential candidates, because they don’t like what he has to say about the most important and persistent political issues in the public’s mind? It’s absurd! It’s messed up! It’s unAmerican! It’s a threat to democracy, to free elections, and whatever pretense of constitutional government we have left – and it’s potentially a prelude to socialist dictatorship.
A cops job is dangerous. True enough. But, take another looks a the facts. Since 1880, 22 law enforcement officials have been killed in Madison County. In the last ten years alone, I’ve counted about 15 unnecessary deaths that were the result of jailer depravity, or excessive force by cops. A that rate, the cops have killed around 200 people – almost all of which were innocent or guilty of nothing serious. A track record of 22 cops to 200 innocent citizens isn’t very good. In fact, it’s goddamn unacceptable.
Under the circumstances, someone less experienced and less mature than myself, might not have been able to read the wild-eyed officer as well, and there is no question that he was ready to shoot to kill. Someone else would’ve probably been dead. That was my assessment when it happened, and it still is today.
Isn’t killing a police officer serious? Of course it is, and I’m not making excuses for Albarran. But, the very fact that we have a civilized system that includes an organized method of determining the disposition of crime, and that that system includes police officers who go about doing their job – hopefully in a civilized manner – is the same system that by definition says that even convicts are not to be killed, or allowed to commit suicide, while in prison.
It is a shame and fundamentally wrong that innocent people are often caught in the shuffle when a necessary correction is made to services that have been abused and exploited. Never-the-less, the system of human trafficking that is rooted in Huntsville City Schools and facilitated by child molestation and torture, has been largely dependent on various psychiatric and social services, many provided on the state level, to absorb the collateral damage when individuals resist and refuse to cooperate with the heinous methods of organized crime, and as related to human trafficking, racketeering and (neo-nazi style) methods of extermination.