re: #47 freetoken

Years ago I knew a guy who wanted to be a cop, but he was rejected (twice IIRC) after the tests. He was intelligent enough, but it was the psych tests. I can only guess as why he was rejected, but from my interaction with him he did exhibit very regimented thinking, a classic black-and-white, it’s-the-law type of opinions.

We humans are still in the process of “domesticating” ourselves. We aren’t exactly wild, but we still can revert to very crude tribal behavior.

This is one of the reasons why I detest the politicking of fear. The so-called primary “debates” of the last two elections were full of fear-mongering.

Power brokers exploit people’s fears. Fear of this… fear of that. Fear of drugs brings on the Drug War, which amped up the militarization of police forces, but I think that began a couple of decades earlier, in the 1960’s.

We are still fighting the societal battles of the 1960’s now a generation later. It’s still the struggle for equality, it’s still the struggle of the “other” to be allowed to exist in society.

I wonder what will happen in Ferguson and St. Louis county. I wonder what will happen in Missouri politics, if anything will change.

What’s funny, though certainly not in a ha ha kinda way, is that the idealism of the 60s has already been thoroughly crushed with the systematic impoverishment and destruction of the middle class from which that idealism sprang. The luxury of idealism can no longer be afforded. We’re too busy and exhausted from just trying to survive and keep roofs over our heads and clothes on our children, desperately fighting to keep from slipping even further into the abyss. There is simply no time and energy left to protest about injustices and change those injustices, even those directed at ourselves least of all those affected those who have even less.

This is why Reagan is a hero to the right. The wealthy laugh at their great, increasing fortunes resulting from his successes in changing the conversation from civil rights to welfare queens, and destroying unions and collective bargaining that gave the employed a fair piece of the productivity pie. It’s worked so well they are now arguing for child labor and the elimination of a minimum wage with the cooperation of our mainstream media that no longer calls out these ideas as unAmerican and fucking insane.

And a police officer is being financially rewarded by hateful people for murdering a black kid while corrupt police departments protect him and others like him. Still. In 2014. Only different from lynching by the tool of death.

No, we aren’t fighting the battles of the 60s. We’re pleading for Enlightenment. On bad days, it appears we’re only slipping further into darkness.