The Fear Defence
Watching the horrific video of the licensed-to-carry black male in America being killed by a terrified sounding cop, it struck me that fear is being used as a method of justifying violence rather a lot.
Both of the recent killings of black males this week were committed by police who appear to be trained to fear first, think later and to kill before risking their lives. The result has been that far more have been killed, and yet again America is displaying the usual inability to react appropriately.
Today an Etsy seller was promoting her bluelivesmatter wristbands, and rather than just roll their eyes and move on, she was duly challenged on facebook by a variety of other sellers. Why do people stop and discuss this stuff? It is not acceptable for the police to kill civilians going about their business. It is not acceptable that they feel they are working a warzone because these same civilians are armed, and what on earth does it take before America decides to take action on gun control?
It does not take an enormous amount of effort to determine that the real problem is that the population is armed, therefore the police need to be armed, therefore life is cheap. Likewise it does not induce huge strain to see that American foreign policy and cultural influence is not beneficial to the rest of the world. I am not sure why people would be confused about this. Life matters.
From the perspective of someone like me, looking at culture and economics, America’s devotion to capitalism means that social stratification is used by marketers and government alike to suppress wages, to market goods, to encourage social groups to compete with one another for goods, services and rights. If the population were not being kept stupid via tension and overmarketing, they would soon see that racial tension is a method of divide and conquer, useful only to an oppressive regime which relies on capital labour to maintain a hugely unfair economic system.
Instead Americans of any colour continue to get confused over things like how airline staff should talk to them when they have some money, and whether it is OK to risk being murdered because you want to carry a gun around with you.
The solution to the problem is very simple. Strict gun laws lessen the need for armed police, putting fewer people at risk from trigger happy and apparently poorly trained police.
It has been said that in a military situation, American troops are extremely wasteful with ammunition for much the same reason. Bullets are apparently cheaper than discourse. Lose the bullets, lose the problem. We have reached saturation point in terms of feeling sympathetic to a problem which has been going on for far too long, for entirely spurious reasons. America is not OK, and we should be distancing ourselves as much as we can. It is a rude, stupid and violent society, and it is not improving with events like this. Having money does not justify crappy behaviour towards others. Being poor should not put you at risk of being shot dead. Not rocket science.
Interestingly, under our beloved Conservative government, it appears that jobcentre staff have been retrained much the same way as American police. Even if you are asking for a form to be signed off or a simple question, the staff will react as if you are a potential assailant, and each jobcentre has security staff on hand to haul you out of the door if you should raise your voice for any reason. The appearance of fear is being used as justification for making sure that you are aware that you do not matter, that nobody cares about you, and that you should not expect to be treated with the smallest amount of dignity. In this way they can laugh about making sure that you cannot survive, and that you cannot question them when they get it wrong.
They have also been instructed to give you no information, and calls are recorded to retrain anyone stupid enough to be helpful. I am aware that there are American companies involved with the DWP, and so I am forced to wonder whether we are all entering a war situation, in which those fortunate enough to not need anything assume everything is OK, whilst those who do are in a vortex of pain leading to premature death in the form of being repeatedly told that they do not matter, that they are frightening, and that they will not be getting any help from anywhere.
If this is the case, and from the evidence I have looked at, it certainly seems as if it is, then we are already in a situation that cannot continue. Either the politics of fear and loathing will kill even more people, whilst everyone else becomes dimly aware that there is a problem, or we have to decide that this is not acceptable to us as a society. I move that we adopt the latter policy.
Black lives matter, blue lives matter, life matters. You matter. We need to take action in our own countries to defeat the loathsome strategy of the fear defence, especially when the fear is staged to justify murder. Murder by starvation, or murder by shooting innocent people. It is all murder.