Matt Taibbi thinks everything is awful, and yet he's way more optimistic than I am:
Nobody's willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case ... , the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.But it's not going to be "everyone," because, as Taibbi notes in the same piece, "a white yuppie like me can live in the same city as Garner for 15 years and never even be asked the time by someone in uniform." When is that ever going to change? We know that this has been happening in non-white neighborhoods for years -- Taibbi thinks the resentment in those neighborhoods is going to increase, but it's at a pretty high level already, and has been for a while -- and yet nobody in power ever responds to the anger, however peacefully or violently it's expressed.
Law-enforcement resources are now distributed so unevenly, and justice is being administered with such brazen inconsistency, that people everywhere are going to start questioning the basic political authority of law enforcement. And they're mostly going to be right to do it, and when they do, it's going to create problems that will make the post-Ferguson unrest seem minor.
... you can't send hundreds of thousands of people to court every year on broken-taillight-type misdemeanors and expect people to sit still while yet another coroner-declared homicide goes unindicted. It just won't hold. If the law isn't the same everywhere, it's not legitimate. And in these neighborhoods, what we have doesn't come close to looking like one single set of laws anymore.
When that perception sinks in, it's not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders "ends today." It's going to be everyone. And man, what a mess that's going to be.
The bulk of Taibbi's post is a comparison of what happened to Eric Garner at the hands of the authorities with what happened to the people who crashed the economy a few years back -- obviously, the people who did the economic damage got away scot-free. But if Taibbi thinks injustice can reach the point of being so egregious that the public just won't allow it to continue, then why hasn't that happened in the case of the financial community's misdeeds? Sure, we had Occupy for a few months, but overall we've just watched mutely as the sons of bitches got away with it.
We may be entering an era of protest, but if whites are never treated the way blacks are by the cops, and if most whites never develop sufficient empathy, then I'm not sure protest will change anything. Taibbi expects a reckoning. I'm afraid I expect more of the same.
(Via Balloon Juice.)
6 comments:
I have spoken to numerous fellow whites. The consensus is the blahs are wildly overreacting to unarmed big blahs being murdered by white cops. To the point where I can see an authoritarian "R" Christie/Walker etc. being our next President. 90% + of whites I talk to think I am nuts when I say Wilson should not have emptied his clip on Brown without a trial.
The police SUDDENLY have a legitimacy problem in this country? Good Lord, where has Taibbi been these last 150 years?
But most respectable folks think they might need the police one day, so better not piss them off. And after all, Garner and Brown did kind of bring it on themselves. So yeah, it's all a bit of a worry, but not enough to spoil the holiday season.
The police could have had a legitimacy problem for a very long time, now.
And would have, if liberals and the establishment media had not used such incidents to hide the problems of endemic police violence and general thuggishness behind a smokescreen of hatred directed at white people.
And if liberals had not flown off the handle prematurely, completely without evidence, behaving like lunatic devils from hell exclusively when white cops kill or abuse black civilians.
You guys made it all about race when it should have been all about cops and the entire criminal justice system.
You make everything all about race.
How was your Turkey?
Having a nice holiday season?
The only diference (& hope) is widely-available video recording technology. In fifteen or twenty yrs. there'll be enough evidence of common-place day-to-day police brutality amassed it may finally be enough to convince people.
Or not.
I don't know how we do it, but we need to instill into them that the main job of a police department is for keeping the peace - and that "Peace Officers" are not occupying military forces in an occupied foreign town like Fallujah!
And it doesn't help that the military sends used toys to "Peace Officers."
Or that the NRA uses every incident like Ferguson or Staten Island to sell more guns to whites, by inciting yet more fear and hate of minorities.
Though, the NRA is color-blind when it comes to sales, it's marketing is towards the whites.
But, I'm afraid that our politicians are too afraid of the NRA's political clout, to do anything about it.
It's a never ending cycle of perpetual violence:
The NRA pushes more guns.
And when more gun-violence incidents happen, the NRA markets the need for more guns.
The only good news, is that today there are far fewer gun-owners.
The problem is, the ones who have them, have more, and become more and more frightened, and buy still more and more guns.
So, we have fewer guns - but more in the hands of the people who probably shouldn't be allowed to be armed, because they're mentally unstable.
Just I am apt to remind shit-talking war pigs that China's army is greater than the population of the Untied States, all would well advised to recall that the white dogs no longer constitute a majority. They, as their Neanderthal ancestors will be assimilated.
Resistence is futile.
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