A friend of mine asked on her SM the following question.
Wow the 3rd precinct has just been breached and overrun by the rioters. They are burning down the town. I feel the anger and frustration but how is this helping to solve the problem?
This is how I answered her.
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Consider this reframing.
Those who are on the streets in Minneapolis are reacting to, what Martin Luther King III has called a lynching, in broad daylight, In 2020. And the men who performed this murder did so on video, and have not been arrested.
These people are reacting to the last 100 years of laws from the state, and social norms from their surrounding communities - including Churches, banks, schools, and businesses - which have deprived them of all manner of equal sharing of housing - such as the red-line laws which created today's ghettos and which are now perpetuated by social norms - of education - by, for example, defining "school districts" nationwide based on neighborhood, which were created by these red-line laws, specifically to deprive them of decent education - of jobs and wealth, which we claim are on merit but which we also know require that education that has been placed solidly out of reach - of healthcare, which we have been careful to tie to those jobs they cannot get, instead of insuring everyone in the country has access to "single payer" or "free at point of use" healthcare, such as in the UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, Germany, and every other decent country in the world.
Black Americans see all this, and so do the rest of us. And every single American knows that this racism exists, knows that it is in every aspect of our society, and knows that it creates real harms that ruin lives by the millions.
These people are not rioters. They are revolutionaries - demanding the equal place our laws promise them and that justice demands, in a liberal democratic experiment where the room full of white men - and no one else - which is currently running the place declare themselves and the thugs who support them "very good people", when they are anything but.
And now, the Department of Defense has put on alert its military police, to be prepared to enter Minneapolis. This would be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - a Federal law to restrain the US government from an act of war against its own people.
And the revolutionaries in the streets of Minneapolis - and in Atlanta, Oakland and Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, Louisville, Memphis, Columbus, and Las Vegas - are about to find themselves in a conflict with the US Federal government.
The problem is not new. We do not arrive at this moment with the innocence of ignorance. The problem is supported by half the country.
So what is the solution? The solution is this: Grab a fucking torch and join them.