They don’t care. Let me repeat: They don’t care. The American machine is performing as expected, as designed.
We watched the young man, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, being killed while lying face down on a sidewalk in Minneapolis. After, the chorus of voices rang out that he was legally carrying, that he was a nurse, that he served the sickest patients at a veteran’s hospital. Voices who are trying to find compassion for a human life taken by border control agents. These agents, who, instead of patrolling a border, were fighting protesters in the street.
The problem is that Trump voters do not care. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about America. They don’t care that they are hypocritical. Everything that isn’t MAGA is bad; therefore, even those who legally carry (like many of them) are still foolish for doing the same thing as them. It is wildly illogical, but so is MAGA. They don’t care about God because if you died in the street in the service of others instead of that of their supreme leader, you deserve what you get.
Not only do Trump voters not care, but the Trump administration is also flagrantly ignoring protocol and standards while actively harming American citizens, and lying to our faces about it. Not misinformation, not mistruths, or mistakes. These people are bold-faced lying to the American people, and gaslighting us to “see” what they need us to believe in, both the Renee Good videos and now the Alex Pretti videos. We know that we saw him filming, helping a woman, then tackled in a fetal position, and then face down and still while being shot, perhaps nine times. We know that he wasn’t doing what the Trump Administration claims.
A Lie
Why, then, do we keep begging for compassion? Why do we imagine the system is going to make some radical changes without radical actions by all of us who are angry enough?
Remember the Capitol Riots? Those people, while misguided, were angry enough to act.
How many more Americans need to die?
Plenty of Black, Latin, and other POC’s have died at the hands of law enforcement, but now that the target is also on white bodies, how angry will you be? How far are you willing to go so that this nation is fair for all people and not just comfortable for you?
What happened in Minneapolis was enraging because the system continues to press down. Instead of it being hidden, it is in our faces through the propaganda and the system’s bullets, willing to fire into innocent flesh to secure itself.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called in the National Guard, and comment sections across the internet wondered if that was a move to protect the people. Who are we kidding?
While we love Governor Beshear in Kentucky, we saw him use the National Guard in a way that resulted in the death of David McAtee. The system is created to keep the system safe.
America is the illusion of freedom — the illusion of rights and the illusion of opportunity. You can live under the illusion until you disrupt the apple cart. You can move ever so slightly in this system, but never deny it what it desires.
Women, you don’t have enough children to work in rich men’s factories, so America decides that you no longer will have access to life-saving healthcare or to birth control. You want to educate yourself as a woman, or (pearl clutch) a Black woman, and see how quickly you will be fired en masse or given far less from your positions in the rich man’s corporations.
You want to be a white cisgender man or a white queer woman and stand up for the lowest people in the American caste system, you can die with them like dogs in the street.
White people, especially, but all of us, have to stop our fetish for the American fantasy. It will never be so unless the system is brought down completely and reset.
For that to happen, blood will have to run thicker in the streets than it does right now. The machinery needs to stop producing and money for the wealthy needs to dry up. The bleach needs to be poured and not trickled from our media sources.
Until we brace for impact and “throw our shoes into the works,” dear Luddites, this system will run exactly as it is designed. We will have this same conversation week after week, year after year, decade after decade.
“Nothing is new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9
