Black Lives Matter — Black President Not

The criminal murder of Michael Brown and the subsequent blatant killings of young black people (now almost a weekly occurrence) reveal a deep-seated unresolved hate and racial problems in the USA. In the past months, it has become a consistent news trend where the police have been reported to have shot and killed most often unarmed black person across the states. Some of these barbaric killings have been captured on tape and can be seen on You Tube. Watching as an outsider, I question the kind of police force policing the streets across the USA. All indications show how willing and eager they are to pull the trigger either with no or least provocation. As a matter of fact, it appears to me that, if someone wants to kill somebody, all that they have to do is to dial 911 and give the address details and the job is done. How often has it been reported in the news where people have called the police to help resolve petty domestic issues and has ended in fatal shootings? It appears anytime the police show up anywhere in the states, somebody have to die. Such is the insatiable thirst by the police to pull the trigger in the land of the free.

To compare and contrast the questionable nature of the US police force to other police force across the globe, I will refer you to view (on you-tube) a recent hostage situation in Holland, where a young man ceased a TV station with a pistol (later confirmed as a rubber pistol), a close watch of the video reveals how professional the Dutch police handled themselves and the situation resulting in no death or injury to anybody. The fact of the matter is, the police are called several times to many homes across the globe and 99.99% of the time, they don’t pull their guns or kill anybody (even in the third worlds). A friend of mine who pointed my attention to the hostage video pass a comment; “no one would have been able to count the number of bullets in this young man’s body should this have happened in the US”. The increasing rate of deliberate shootings of black people is a bit baffling given the fact that the first family occupying the most powerful house (i.e. the white house) on the planet is actually black. Most people around the world assumed the hate and race problems in the USA will soon become a thing of the past when the first black president was voted into power, however, nobody can delude him/herself that is the case, to the contrary, more black people are on the streets protesting for their right to live (some time violently as seen in Ferguson) with the slogan “black life matters” (clearly a black president does matter).

Mahatma Gandhi once said, you can judge the nature or the character of any human society by the way it treats the most vulnerable in that society (i.e. the poor, the homeless, asylum seekers, minority groups, etc.). By this assertion, one can say the nature of US society today, especially for young black people and perhaps other minority groups could be described at best as miserable. It is probably odious to assert that the long history of systematic and consistent deprivation, discrimination, stigmatization, stereotyping and witch haunting of black people in the USA have created structural inequality in terms of employment opportunities and better economic prospects in most black communities resulting in massive joblessness, poverty, drug related crimes and homelessness. One would assume a great nation like the USA (champions of human rights and democracy) will use its vast resources to seriously address such structural inequalities/injustice which has created the widespread problem of homelessness and poverty, mostly in black communities; instead, such resources are used to criminalize the poor and homeless and get rid of them mostly by violent means. Though not openly discussed, the war on drugs is a disguised form of war on poor black and other minority people. it is actually a crime (more of a plague) to be black and poor or black and homeless in the USA, evident of which is the extremely high incarceration rate of black people as a mean of keeping the street clean while profiting from the unjust prison industrial system. On the surface, it may seem so simple for some people to blame black people for being jobless or homeless, however, such prejudices vanishes so quickly when one critically analyzes the skewed and unjust economic system currently operating in the USA which has turned the once a productive heavenly country for all into a sort of hell for the poor (e.g. Detroit now and New Orleans, during the aftermath of Katharina).

Though on paper, they profess capitalism and free market as the system operating in the USA, the reality however is diabolically different. Most of what is actually happening is a deliberate and systematic misappropriation of the nation’s resources (e.g. just look at the over inflated military spending, a typical waste-pipe to the economy). People who rush to blame the poor and homeless do not have time to question this huge military spending (due to the perpetual wars across the globe) and its effect of draining and actually suffocating other sectors of the economy. The needed resources which are required to structure/stimulate long term and sustainable economic recovery programs (e.g. quality and accessible education) are wasted in fighting proxy wars all over the globe, hence, not much is left to foster a nationwide job creation mechanism to help address some of the serious social inequalities issues the nation is facing. While some may violently defend the need for such high military spending as necessary for the sake of national security (which is actually delusional), such people refuse to acknowledge the fact that, the USA and its perceive/real enemies (e.g. Russia, China, Iran, etc.) have enough megatons of bombs to annihilate each other several times over and over, many decades ago. Both opposing parties have kept adding to their stockpiles (a wasteful drain on their national economy), year in year out without any end in sight. So it is common sense to see why such nations will never engage directly in any hot war any time soon except proxy ways as currently being fought in the Ukraine and Syria. The price for direct confrontations (i.e. ww3) will be too much for the entire planet to contain and this is elementary knowledge to all parties. The last time such confrontation nearly resulted in ww3 was the Cuban nuclear crisis and one could see the swift nature at which the issue was resolved when it actually came close.

The reason why the entire nation is kept at ransom under a constant state of perpetual fear of imminent attack has nothing to do with reality, but a mere pretext to keep increasing the profit margins of the military industrial complex (the war factory which benefit only some few rich people) at the expense of real national efforts to address the numerous social injustice problems which serve as a breeding ground for such racial killings which has now engulfed the entire police force. It is therefore clear that, the imminent and real danger is not external threats as politicians and the warmongers want you to believe, but internal social implosion/explosion, as hate and race crimes sky-rocket out of hand coupled with hopelessness as a result of social insecurity. The violent demonstration in Ferguson attests how the black population has lost faith in the police force while the shootings at some officers recently demonstrate how some bad-nuts have begun taking matters into their own hands. In a country where per capita ownership of guns surpasses that of many countries around the world, one could just imagine what could happen when such worst case scenario become a reality.

So why should anybody care (especially people living outside the USA) about the internal problems of the USA? Well, beside fearing for the lives of our relatives, friends and love ones living in the states, the answer is quite simple, in the era of Globalization, whatever happens in the USA has a far reaching consequence and resonance to other nations around the world (e.g. 9/11 happened in the USA but the war on terror is global), hence, the spillover effect of such rampant, indiscriminate and total disregard to human life by cops in the USA should be a source of worry for all.