Today, like many of us we have sat back and discussed what happened in Ferguson. We've discussed where we are as a nation. In a diary I found particularly powerful earlier today, LaFeminista argued that this is a clear sign we are not post-racial. And we aren't even close.
Earlier in the day on Monday, I told Joanmar that I expected a no-indictment. That it made me sick, but in my gut, I knew that's where we were headed. As with so many others, all we could do was say "please, don't let that be.." but by 8PM, it was.
The easy outrage was to blame the district attorney. Republicans. The police officer. They were all at fault - and yes, in my mind, they will always have this on their conscious. It won't be just this incident, but the fact that we have set the standard where dealing death in the street can be defined as justifiable force.
As I drove around today, though, the thought that stuck in my mind was that we live in an America we had never imagined - and that someone else had some blame in this problem too - and it was us. Democrats were now living in an America that we, democrats, helped create - an America that creates vast stretches of darkness - for minorities, for women, for children, for gay and lesbians and for all of us who are not part of the right wing collective.
We are shocked, appalled and baffled when Justice is denied in areas we've abandoned. We are horrified when people are persecuted. We are outraged when travesties of justice occur. We shake our fist in anger and we proclaim this is not the America we believe in.
And a few weeks from now.. a few months from now.. a few hours from now, the messages will fly on DailyKos that will read: "This is why I wouldn't live there". "This is why they should just leave". "This is why it's not worth talking to those people."
And we continue creating a sea of darkness. A sea of people who haven't heard of justice because it's not worth telling them. They don't have a hope of peace because people aren't advocating for them. They can't remember opportunity because opportunity left.
And whether we want to admit it or not, these are the consequences of running away when fighting is too hard.
In places like Ferguson, we've created debtors prisons.
http://marginalrevolution.com/...
You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”
If you have money, for example, you can easily get a speeding ticket converted to a non-moving violation. But if you don’t have money it’s often the start of a downward spiral that is hard to pull out of
In places like Kansas, we discriminate and make life difficult for those who are gay.
http://www.salon.com/...
Stenzel said her career as a successful local economic development official in northwestern Kansas unraveled after she spoke out by telling audiences that bigotry was bad for business. “Unless we want to be fiftieth in education, fiftieth in property tax revenues, first in unwanted pregnancies, we have to bring our kids back,” she said, referring to Kansas today, where outside two major metropolitan areas and towns with universities or military bases, vast swaths wither from depopulation. “We need to stop the discrimination.”
In Louisiana, there are concerns of racism, of voter suppression. In Arizona, we passed legislation aimed at Hispanics.
In Nebraska, legislation is now on the books that prevents you from renting to someone who is hispanic without them providing papers first.
http://www.latimes.com/...
We can shake our fists and we can be mad "how can this be" "those terrible people" but what, exactly are we doing? Where is the initiative of progressives to fight for the firewall in this country that is growing.
The virulent response in the red sea that we don't talk to gets more aggressive every year. They do so because their is no 'middle'. We give them no counter arguments. We provide them no reason to think about issues differently.
We have written them off.
No, we are shocked when terrible things happened. Shocked and baffled.
There are a lot of red-state kossacks here. We see it every day. Racism. Sexism. Hatred. Fear. Some of the commentary might as well be a Beer Hall Putsch, with all the undertones of hatred, refusal, and division. We see it in Cliven Bundy.
When we criticize what happened in Missouri - or what happens elsewhere, we then turn to message boards at CNN, FoxNews, and elsewhere and we see the vitriol, the hatred.
We see Christian Groups saying that people like Michael Brown should die because he "wasn't raised right"
http://christiannews.net/...
And we ask: How does this message stand?
In the 1960s, progressives and those who cared about social justice went to places like Little Rock. Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery and all through the south.
They went because it was the right thing to do.
Where is our leadership? Where is our voice? Where are those to say: we have to fight to prevent the fracture.
Evil brews in the darkness.
Hatred that is never countered grows.
Hope is lost when there is no effort to provide it.
And we lose a part of who we are when we give up on so many people before we start.
Before you write that comment that says "you should leave", "you should quit", are you prepared for what comes next? Are you OK with something like this happened because "well, I told them to leave, we weren't going to try?"
I'm not OK with it.
And tonight, I'm sitting at home thinking: the firewall of American ideas is at grave risk. And it's at grave risk, sure, because of the virulent and sometimes terrible ideas of those who propose a phobia that isn't them. What makes me heartsick, though, is that a large swath of America is at risk not because of that message... but because we, the left, decided we would stop caring about the people there, and we would stop providing a counter message to them because the cost was too high.
How much more injustice does it take before we say: the cost of doing nothing is too high?