News of the Day

An 88 year old war veteran is beaten to death by teenage boys in Spokane. They use heavy flashlights. Perhaps the photos online are prejudicially chosen, but they show the perps as ignorant punks who were bound to do such a thing sooner or later. The comments on the news article are, by and large, nearly as brainless as the deed itself. I sit here trying to figure this out. A few days ago two boys gunned down another boy apparently because they felt like it. That the murderers in these incidents are black sets the cause of ending racially profiling back a little. Is it race? I think not, for the Republicans– who are overwhelmingly white–do the same thing in way that doesn’t cry out immediately “crime.”  We live in a time when it’s OK to target the weak. We live in a time when what is right is measured by what you can get away with. Cops murder unarmed innocents, and then lie about it, plant false evidence, perjure themselves blue in the face, and get off without reprimand, so why not the boys in the hood? We live in a time of tribalism, when you’ll show off for your buddies no matter how insane the stunt– limiting voting rights, shutting down the government, murdering an octogenarian, all the same. We live in a time when we expect respect though we are not in any way respectable. We want our opinions to be taken seriously even when they are pulled out of our ass. We resent being made to feel bad about ourselves even when we are maelstroms of violence and stupidity. I don’t even know what is a cause and what an effect. I know that the only way to survive from day to day is to shut out 90% of the information flowing into the sensorium.