Considering what has been going on recently, I thought it was important that I say something: Two things can be true at the same time. This is a theme that runs through my life. I am often caught between two positions or two factions that are both right and both wrong – and so everyone hates me. This is especially true in the current war between the police and Black Lives Matter.
Anyone who actually watches the news already knows that the cops are jerks. It isn’t simply the ratio of bad cops to good cops, which is debatable; the problem is much deeper than that. To illustrate what I mean, I need a few examples. It is entirely possible that I have been misinformed on the details of these events, but that isn’t important because I’m only using them to explain principles as you shall see in a moment. The first event occurred in New Hampshire. I heard that in attempting to arrest a suspect at a gas station, the police threw flash-bang grenades at his vehicle. I know that if I was suddenly surrounded by explosions and fast-moving armed people shouting at me, I would assume that I was under attack by those wishing me harm and would have nothing to lose by fighting back. In this situation, as everyone should have predicted, the suspect shot back at the police, forcing police to return fire, who killed him and his girlfriend and somehow missed hitting the baby in the back seat and everyone in the surrounding neighborhood. If they had simply cut off his exits and invited himself to surrender, things might have gone differently. I have also heard of many cases, such as the recent one in Kentucky, of cops storming into houses with guns drawn and the homeowners being charged with attempted murder for firing at the cops. Common sense dictates that even if the intruders identify themselves as cops, this is likely to be missed in the chaos. Common sense dictates that these could also be fake cops since it has happened before that imposters have robbed people. Common sense dictates that these could be crooked cops sent by an organized crime syndicate or a government-turned-tyrannical, since those things have also happened before. No-knock warrants terrorize even law-abiding citizens, since it has happened before that police had the wrong house and they have been known to cover up their mistakes with lies. When police put people into a legitimate self-defense situation, no one should ever be charged with a crime for killing them. Note: There are probably rare times that it is worth the risk to do these things, and I’m not saying that the cops should necessarily always be charged. All I’m saying is that the accused must not have resisting arrest, assault, murder, or attempted murder added to their charges, since it is possible none would have happened if the police had acted differently. That these mistakes sometimes happen isn’t the real problem. We live in an imperfect world with imperfect people and things are bound to go wrong sometimes. The problem is that other cops, their supervisors, and their allies support these types of actions. I even heard Brandon Tatum, former cop, say on Dave Rubin’s show, The Rubin Report, that cops need to enter unknown situations with their weapons drawn for their own safety. That’s insane! By the same logic, I should point my gun at the police during routine traffic stops just in case they get out of hand. “Keep your hands where I can see them and no sudden movements,” I should say. Somehow, I don’t think it would end well for either of us. Idiocy doesn’t even begin to describe it. There can only be one explanation: Brandon Tatum is a very evil man. I’m through messing around pretending that all ideologies are equally valid. The gloves are off. If you advocate for the police to be allowed to do these things you are evil incarnate. It isn’t just that a minority of fringe wackos like Tatum support these ideas. The problem is widespread. Even people I know support them. People also tell me that I must always do whatever an officer says and sort it out later in court if it was wrong, but this is completely unreasonable. I can’t be unkilled or uninjured later in court. I can’t get my moment of indignity back later in court. It isn’t “resisting arrest” if I am rushed and grabbed without warning or explanation and I instinctively pull away. It isn’t “disobeying a lawful order” if the order is so preposterous that I assume I must have misunderstood and seek clarification first. Yet there are those that blame anyone who does not immediately follow orders and place zero blame on the one giving the orders. Deaf people cannot always understand orders. Mute people cannot always answer questions. Blind people sometimes bump into officers. Autistic people are highly sensitive to touch and sometimes misinterpret social cues. Schizophrenics are sometimes paranoid and nervous. Claustrophobic people might not want to be cuffed and placed in a vehicle. Cops should be trained how to deal with these people, but it seems many cops don’t even have the basic social skills of a kindergartener. The problem isn’t just “police brutality.” It’s all the lies and minor injustices done. It’s false traffic tickets. It’s that the judicial branch is often biased in favor of the police. I have no idea how to behave around police. The news tells me there are imposters out there, so I should never give out my license or anything with my address on it to anyone I can’t verify has a right to it. At the same time, lawyers tell me to never utter a word to cops because they can twist my words around to make me look guilty, or claim I slurred my words in order to accuse me of intoxication, but how can I verify their identity without talking to them? At the same time, advice is circulating that if I have a gun on me, the very first thing I need to do before anything else is announce this (by talking) and allow the (possibly fake) cop to disarm and search me so I don’t get shot. There is literally no way to win. There is no way to stay out of trouble. Lawyers tell me that I have a right under the first, fourth, and fifth amendments not to answer questions or volunteer information about what weapons I might be carrying, yet I have heard countless anecdotes of people “remaining silent” who were detained, arrested, and even ordered out of vehicles they were not driving for failure to identify. I was taught in school that America is a nation of laws and it is laws we are to obey, not the whims of government agents, yet as an adult I am told that police have huge leeway in managing emergency situations and that any disputes must be handled later in the rigged courts or at the ballot box where I am repeatedly outvoted – and this is assuming the ballots were counted fairly. Police have also abused me and people I know. When I checked up on an old friend I was very concerned about, those around her started harassing me. I considered reporting them to the police but wasn’t sure their behavior quite rose to that level. While I thought it over, she went to the police first and accused me of harassing her! Without ever reaching out to me to get the whole story, the police chose their side and actively constructed lies to hurt me. They searched completely unrelated public posts of mine, construed them as veiled threats against her, and showed them to her, knowing perfectly well at the time how mentally unstable and paranoid she was already. I could no longer report that I was harassed to the police because they had already chosen sides and I believed they would use any words I spoke against me. The court did not allow me to make a defense and the judge ruled against me even though what the police falsely claimed happened didn’t even fit the legal definition of harassment in that state. Furthermore, when I complained to the police chief, they brought charges against me again – claiming that my complaint was a roundabout way to contact my accuser in violation of the court order. The entire department is corrupt! For months, I wondered if the next step was for them to claim I violated the no-contact order so they could drag me out of bed in the middle of the night. They had already lied once, why not again? I worried over everything I posted online, thinking it could be construed as a threat. I wanted to be a writer. How could I ever promote my fiction books or my non-fiction blogs safely? Since what happened to me was so lawless and so detached from truth, I fully expected that if I submitted to arrest, the cops might beat me or kill me in custody and then claim I started the fight. Why would I ever submit to arrest? What do I have to gain? What do I lose by fighting back? Considering that I had reason at the time to believe my ex-friend was suicidal as well as paranoid, and the court system had already failed me, it would not have been unreasonable to go full vigilante after these cops and stop them by any means necessary. I would be doing the world a favor. For years the story has been burning to get out of me, but I held back from going to the national press only because I didn’t want to hurt my ex-friend who is as much victim as perpetrator. I have also been told by well-meaning but misguided individuals that any public mention of the incident will only invite further abuse and also prevent anyone from hiring me because hiring managers and the public at large are predisposed to believe the police and predisposed to believe women. So be it. I refuse to work for cowards who won’t stand up for truth. You don’t deserve me. People are now saying “defund the police,” “abolish the police,” and “abolish the courts.” It sounds crazy – and it is – but they have a point. If you lived in a city with cops so corrupt that if you called them for help with an intruder you were as likely as not to be mistaken for the intruder, or as likely as not charged with an unrelated crime, or as likely as not to just have them not show up (this has happened to people I know), you might think you were better off abolishing the police and taking your chances with the criminals. What loss is there if they don’t even show up half the time? Some people say we should reform the police rather than get rid of them entirely. I agree, but people have been screaming for reform for years. The system and its countless clueless allies have resisted change. You can’t blame people for wanting to tear it all down. Maybe recent events will be a catalyst for reform. I hope so, but it could also be used as an excuse for police to crack down harder. There is nobody in the country who hates the cops more than I do. Nobody has more reason to be angry than I. The protestors and I have the same enemy. The problem is: I’m the wrong color. Why are so many black people so stupid to think they are the only ones with problems? Don’t the lives of the homeless matter? Don’t the lives of ex-cons matter? Don’t the lives of the unborn matter? If you have a job (or at least had one before COVID-19 hit), you are doing better than I am right now. If you have your own room and your own bed, you are doing better than I am right now. If you have more than one friend, and those friends live in the same state as you, you are doing better than I am right now. If you have ever had a girlfriend or boyfriend in your entire life, you are doing much better than I have ever done. I’ve been bullied and treated as different my entire life. I’ve been a victim of prejudice for being male, for being Christian, for being single, and treated rudely many times for reasons mysterious to me. For all I know, it might have been for being white. I once lost my home and thousands of dollars in investment because of a crooked judge. I’ve been charged with a pretend crime by crooked cops. Twice patrol cars have slowed down while passing me as if I was being profiled somehow. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint. I’ve been fired from jobs twice for no fault of my own. When I was a child, my father was passed over for a job because of affirmative action, fired from another job over a false charge of sexual harassment, and evicted without mercy for being one day late on rent. Where is my white privilege? I know that many if not most black people have things very tough, caught between failing schools, limited economic opportunities, drug problems, gang warfare, and corrupt police. I sympathize. I’d like to help, but we can’t work together so long as your loudest voices perpetuate an us versus them mentality. Black Lives Matter has made all white people the enemy. Black Lives Matter is a black supremacist group and I can prove it: On more than one occasion, their leadership has prematurely taken sides in high-profile shooting cases before all the facts were in and solely because of race. They held a rally where whites were told not to attend. They have waged a war of words on their own allies who agree and sympathize when they innocently state in support that all lives matter. The only explanation for this can be that the Black Lives Matter leadership believes that only black lives matter. They should change their name to Only Black Lives Matter. By bringing race into it, Black Lives Matter clouds the issue and prevents unity. One prone to conspiratorial thinking might think they are working with the cops. That some police have started kneeling to them isn’t helping. That in many cities rioters were released while those merely defending themselves from being beaten or killed by them were charged isn’t helping either. Our legal system is completely arbitrary at this point. Either way, so long as Black Lives Matter dominates the conversation, I can’t help you. Whether you are black, Hispanic, Native American, or whatever, renouncing Black Lives Matter (and Antifa) is the first step you have to take if we are ever going to fix this. Making enemies of the white majority is a sure way to get crushed. Remember, there are white supremacists out there too. Black Lives Matter is the best recruiting tool they have. There are people now saying that white silence is violence. While not strictly true, they have a point. I think we do wrong not to speak against evil when we see it. This is why I’ve been speaking out my whole life against cops, government in general, and partisans that would pointlessly divide us along racial, religious, or even sexual lines. I’ve written books. I’ve written blogs. I’ve invited anyone who will listen to talk politics, but nobody listens and some of them tell me I have white privilege and thus have nothing to say worth listening to. What difference does it make if I stay silent?
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AuthorMy name is Dan. I am an author, artist, explorer, and contemplator of subjects large and small. Archives
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