You all know their names. Jon-Bonet Ramsey, Natalee Holloway, Susan Smith's children. SANDY HOOK! You may even be able to name all 26 of them. Very, very rarely, someone of color slips through the media micro-lens with more than a speck of melanin in their skin tones. Trayvon Martin comes to mind.
Every time there is violence against children in the US we recoil in shock and horror, unable to even fathom that young innocent lives can be ended brutally and their faces flash across our screens as our Presidents weep. While grief can never be comparative, in America it certainly is selective.
As the President spoke on Television addressing the children shot at Sandy hook, his orders had a Tomahawk cruise missile full of cluster bombs kill 55 people in Yemen, presumably to get one "bad guy" in a car.
21 children.
14 women.
20 boys, who by our Democratic Presidents decree are listed as "combatants" not "civilians" for being between the ages of 8 and 80, and as such are expendable.
55 murdered, presumably to get one "terrorist" presumably targeted as such by some questionable intelligence report. Who knows? There are never trials, just killings... and "collateral damage... in this case 54 to 1. 54 unwept victims.
20 of "our" children die and we writhe in agony, and scream to the rafters about violence and guns. We kill 21 of "their" children and even the crickets make nary a sound.
"That's war," you may say, but what about the domestic war we are waging on people of color in this country? On the poor?
Have any of you counted how many unarmed black men have been shot to death by the Police this year? 120. Men in wheelchairs, men with severe and obvious mental disabilities, men trying to untangle their foot from a seatbelt, men running for safety from a bad scene at Occupy.
I postulated to a friend who mentioned Kent State, that perhaps to stop the Militarization and murderous rampages of the Police that they need to kill a nice white girl. Then, perhaps someone would give a fuck. I said it with full irony and pointed rage.
120 black citizens have been killed by the Police in 2012.
That is, on the average 10 black people a month murdered by the State. 10. A month. Where is the outrage, I ask.
We seem to have no problem with gun violence when the perpetrator is the State.
We seem to have no problem with torture when the perpetrator is the State.
We seem to have no problem with Grand Larceny when the perpetrator is the State.
We have no problem with being spied on when the perpetrator is the State.
We seem to have no problem with weapons of Mass destruction when the perpetrator is "our" State.
We seem to have no problem with the death of children when the perpetrator is the State.
One crazy person harms 20 people, and we lose our National shit. Yet we say and do nothing about the daily violence the State does to us and others with our tacit permission.
And, just in case you were too distracted by the young, white dead victims to notice any other news?
Our Black, Liberal President has decided to cut your Medicare and Social Security in order to make Rich White Men richer. Our Rich, predominately White Congress is reaffirming NDAA's right to indefinitely detain you without charge or cause. Our Military Industrial Complex is surrounding Syria with Warships with plans to invade and kill even more brownish children for ever bigger profits. Our educational systems are actively being made into "pay to play" to further divide the opportunities of the Rich from the Poor. Right to Work is now the law of the land in a quarter of our States, meaning lower wages and less democracy. All being done while we are distracted by Sandy Hook.
Noted too, is that while what little health services we may get are being cut, mental health services in this country are practically null.
But consider this:
A full one third of black males in the United States can expect to be in prison at some point in their lives. That is, if they are not extra-judicially murdered.
The median age of a male in Gaza is 17 years old, with about 44% under 14 years of age. Adult men get killed there.
We have killed ONE AND A HALF MILLION souls in Iraq thus far, and 20,000 civilians in Afghanistan.
48 women an HOUR are raped in the Congo.
20 white, American kids are dead. Thats all we care about.
Yet, somehow? We are not having discussions about the Police State, the Military State, Class War or Racism.
Missing white girl syndrome, damsels in distress, dead babies. Yes, my heart does go out to them. I have a son, and would be beside myself were he killed. If he was black in the United States, I would worry more about the Police killing him than one mentally ill random man. If we lived in Gaza under Israel - or any of the 11 countries our country is drone bombing, I would fear for him, justifiably, 24/7. Right now? I send him to school without fear, he's white, we aren't at war and he is more likely to get hit by lightening that be shot by a crazed gunman. Were he non-white, that would be a different story. Wrong in every way, but true.
But no one cares about that. We place all our fears, anger and energy on this one story, a story that could not have been timed more perfectly to distract us from more war, more class war and austerity and less freedom.
People of color are the victims of systemic abuse and murder both here and abroad every single day. Abuses and murder in which we are not only complicit? We choose to not even acknowledge they happen.
These mass murders are almost always young, white men, but no one will racially profile them. No one will ask if whites are more prone to violence, or say white-culture and white-music is at fault. Of course, no one will, they will blame the gun, not the man; the gun, not his race. Quite the opposite of the media spin had the shooter been of African, Latino or Arabic descent, in which all of those things would have been brought into question.
We will ban guns, and make our schools into little fortress prisons instead of discussing mental illness, or societal breakdown due to socio-economic stressors. We won't worry about what happens to the "others."
As long as "nice, white people" and our offspring feel "safe" everything will be ok.
This will fade, new gun control regulation will come out, people of color will still die both by economic warfare, police brutality and the crime that becomes survival to the poorest. People of color will die from the colonial desires of the War Machine. And everything will be "fine" by the media and the masses again, soon.
The Prison Industrial Complex will still "buy" young black men from the police for which to profit in the taking of tax dollars to "keep" them in some sick sort of new slavery.
The President will not weep on TV, there will be no Fox News tribute, and the families of young men like Ernest Duenez Jr will suffer alone. No one will talk about the victims of the war on people of color when the State uses the guns.
Yes, yes, all will be fine and there will be no reams of social media gnashing of teeth or arguments about guns and violence.
That is, until the next "nice, white girl" distraction happens....
Sigh.