There has been a lot of talk about a lot of death these days. My last post thanked people for joining us in the fight against the injustice that takes place regularly in this country. Our system is broken and it’s just the lot of us out there on the front lines trying to put it back together with some duck tape, gum and paper clips.  It’s hard folks. We haven’t been given a whole lot to work with here, when we do appointed work our vouchers get cut (you spent too much time reviewing discovery) or caps are reached before crucial stages (like, uh, trial.) When we are retained we have to factor in the cost of investigators, experts, overhead.

And there is this thing we like to call “the awesome power of the government” and all of its unlimited resources. You know it is unlimited because these folks believe they protect you, right? And how could anyone spare any expense in the protection of it’s people? Experts to say you are sane when you have clearly lost your marbles – don’t worry, we got it! Investigators to spend years following you and your college buddies selling marijuana – the entire DEA is at your service. A guy with a criminal conviction from 2002 who now has a house and some kids and a good job- Buh Bye, we can pay for your one way plane ticket back to Jamaica and get you all your documents to make sure you don’t run into legal troubles when you get there.*

Honestly, the point of all of this is this – if you think at any time that because someone like Marilyn Mosby is going after some cops in Baltimore (shitty, terrible case, by the way and if there is a conviction on anything other than maybe an assault I will be shocked) that somehow someone somewhere is serving the ends of justice you would be mistaken. If you think the justice department issuing a 100 plus page report on Ferguson and it’s racist ways means the government is going to do something about it, you would be ever so wrong. Did our black president move us forward on civil rights or did he allow us to be stalked and spied on by our own government agencies without any repercussion. Are you waiting for Bernie Sanders to save your soul?

This entire post started because of Charleston. I had these thoughts swirling in my mind and then I read Scott Greenfield’s post and I got to thinking of this song by Rage Against the Machine and I thought it’s us. He’s right. It is truly us. We (even me and my fellow defenders) they us. We kill here and there and we kill for sport and for hate and for passion and love and money. We kill for oil and to ‘protect democracy’. We kill when they are ‘the other’ and we kill when they are ‘the us’ and it truly doesn’t matter or make a difference. At the end of it all, people are dead and they aren’t ever coming back. It won’t matter if it’s a hate crime or how many years in prison the culprit gets, they will all be just as dead. And if he, himself gets the death penalty, then he will be dead too and we as a nation will be in the same place we were before he walked into a church and killed 9 people. 

Maybe people feel that they need to politicize this murder in order to make sure it never happens again. I think that’s a nice gesture, but completely fruitless since it will happen again. I mean, hey, we have the Civil Rights Act and we are still fighting about that. Maybe if there are no more guns this won’t ever happen again, or maybe if everyone in the church had a gun it wouldn’t have happened. I have no idea but I am pretty sure neither of those scenarios would be preventative.

I saw that movie “Twelve Years a Slave” and afterwards I posted on facebook “How do white people live with themselves” and the responses I got from white people were vicious. Most of them said they didn’t feel bad or guilty because they didn’t do it and they aren’t responsible for what other people did. But I mean, my family didn’t even come to America until 1971 and I felt bad. How could you not? The stuff white America did was terrible. And this is why in order to truly prevent something like Charleston from happening again we each have to own the murders. Not by calling the perpetrator a terrorist (although I get why people want to do that) but by acknowledging that each of us contribute to the fabric of this country and that it’s pretty torn up right now.

* All true