One thing I never understood with the US. With how they killed George Floyd on the street in front of everyone and they were set to get away with it - my first thought would have been that what would be different if they did that to me? I’d come up with nothing, and that’s terrifying.
People are arguing about the legality of the death sentence, but a cop can kill you with impunity any day, even tomorrow, with no reason, even in your home. If you are reading this while you’re trying to sleep in your bed, or sitting on the toilet, there are people who could kick down your door and murder you, legally without consequences.
How can you tune that out? How do you live like that? It wasn’t like that even under communism, at least not after the 70s, and the period before left a collective trauma on half a continent.
What else would we do? Like it’s not ok and we’re obviously not ok. But any effort to improve things is met with state violence and further propaganda to convince half the country that we’re the problem with America. I’m white, that makes me lucky when it comes to this.
You try explaining to your fellow Americans that it’s horrifying that cops do this they’ll say “everyone knows you need to do what the cops say and they were just a criminal anyways, and we need the cops to keep us safe.” They also love to say “maybe you should experience violent crime and see how you feel about cops then.” And let me say, I’ve experienced violent crime in the past year and my opinion of cops worsened.
But yeah huge swathes of Americans have problems with it. We marched over it in 2020, we’ve marched over it before and we’ll do it again too. But this country is barely a democracy, we’re bound between two parties, one that’s pro cop but thinks they need slaps on the wrist and more training when they murder people and the other that thinks that doing that is an unacceptable level of punishment. Oh and the deck is stacked in the latter’s favor.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if our nation collapses in the upcoming administration.
One thing I never understood with the US. With how they killed George Floyd on the street in front of everyone and they were set to get away with it - my first thought would have been that what would be different if they did that to me? I’d come up with nothing, and that’s terrifying.
People are arguing about the legality of the death sentence, but a cop can kill you with impunity any day, even tomorrow, with no reason, even in your home. If you are reading this while you’re trying to sleep in your bed, or sitting on the toilet, there are people who could kick down your door and murder you, legally without consequences.
How can you tune that out? How do you live like that? It wasn’t like that even under communism, at least not after the 70s, and the period before left a collective trauma on half a continent.
What else would we do? Like it’s not ok and we’re obviously not ok. But any effort to improve things is met with state violence and further propaganda to convince half the country that we’re the problem with America. I’m white, that makes me lucky when it comes to this.
You try explaining to your fellow Americans that it’s horrifying that cops do this they’ll say “everyone knows you need to do what the cops say and they were just a criminal anyways, and we need the cops to keep us safe.” They also love to say “maybe you should experience violent crime and see how you feel about cops then.” And let me say, I’ve experienced violent crime in the past year and my opinion of cops worsened.
But yeah huge swathes of Americans have problems with it. We marched over it in 2020, we’ve marched over it before and we’ll do it again too. But this country is barely a democracy, we’re bound between two parties, one that’s pro cop but thinks they need slaps on the wrist and more training when they murder people and the other that thinks that doing that is an unacceptable level of punishment. Oh and the deck is stacked in the latter’s favor.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if our nation collapses in the upcoming administration.