One of the most troubling bits about the rash of stories involving unarmed civilians killed by authority figures that dominated the news cycle over the last couple years wasn’t their seeming frequency. Yes, the fact that there seemed to be a new one every few days was beyond alarming, but despite what social and the news media suggested, cops weren’t running around shooting everybody (just like most young Muslim dudes don’t spend their days calling for jihad and most black/Latino kids aren’t in street gangs). What’s REALLY troubling about these events is how they expose the lengths some of us will go to convince ourselves that another human-fucking-being DESERVED to die.
It doesn’t matter our reasons either; doesn’t matter if we’re having difficulty accepting that the people tasked with our protection could do such things (which is odd given that behind every badge is another human-fucking-being dealing with real human-fucking-being shit), nor does it matter how much ‘less’ of a human we think the victim was; to THAT PERSON (and their friends/family) they were just as much of an eat/shit/sleep/die human as us; this we cannot explain away (no matter how much we lean on bullshit “but they stole a candy bar when they were six” rationalizations). It all boils down to us damning another person to DEATH for VIRTUALLY nothing
Continue reading ‘Revolutionary Empathy’