From Al-Jazeera:
What happens if you don’t comply when the police give you an order? What rights do you really have? How free are you, really, when the authorities have weapons pointed at you or when they have the right to draw a weapon and use it with relative impunity?
Over the past few years, I have been tracking the rhetoric that police and other authority figures use to justify all kinds of violence. In cases that seem very different, separated by factors such as age, race, gender, sexuality, geography, class and ability, police explain away their actions by citing noncompliance. They do it because it works. They do it because according to their beliefs, any sign of noncompliance is an invitation to strike.
america.aljazeera.com/…
America’s Cult of Compliance:
The significance of the events in Missouri extends beyond the very real and terrible pattern of police killings of African-American men. It is an intensification of years of cultural shift in which law enforcement and other authority figures have increasingly treated noncompliance as a reason to initiate violence.
This cult of compliance provides the point of intersection between racism and militarization of law enforcement — the primary factors at play in Ferguson — and other issues, such as the overuse of stun guns and the failure of police to respond to the needs of the mentally ill. Police may be motivated by their racism to harass people of color, but when officers get violent, they almost always cite a form of noncompliance as their justification.
Ibid.
What color is “compliance”? If you are white, “compliance”, as far as the police are concerned, has a different meaning than if you are black. Or brown.
Gender can also be factored in if a cop can’t deal with female noncompliance, non-obedience.
We have become, essentially, a police state. With increasing police violence. Especially against black and brown people. Especially under the reign of King Donald.
King Donald loves violence. In the abstract. When it doesn’t touch his lily white, albeit orange-dyed, skin.
I don’t believe that King Donald has ever actually played football . . . so it’s very easy for King Donald to shoot off his mouth and mock victims of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), but that’s typical of King Donald:
Donald Trump has mocked women, disability and war heroism during this toxic presidential campaign. So it's no huge surprise that he's belittled another subject that deserves no scorn — brain injury — while on the stump.
During a rally this Wednesday in Lakeland, Fla., Trump talked about a woman who had fainted but returned to the crowd. “The woman was out cold and now she’s coming back,” Trump said. “See? We don’t go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussion. Oh, oh! Got a little ding on the head. No, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season. Our people are tough.”
time.com/…
Sissyboy King Donald has, his entire life, been securely wrapped in cotton and carefully protected by Big Daddy’s bodyguards. King Donald don’t know squat about the painful reality of actual violence.
On King Donald playing football, I’m going to steal a paragraph from Dave Zirin in the Nation:
It’s exhausting to have a president who gets angrier at outspoken black athletes than at Nazis. It’s exhausting how shameless he is about his bigotry and his toxicity. This is a president who never played football. He never served in the armed forces. He frets over what conclusions we draw from the size of his hands. His skin is thinner than the gossamer wings of a butterfly. He is the epitome of a bullying but frail brand of masculinity. He belongs in a psychological text book as a case study, not in the White House. Look at Trump’s comments—in their entirety—about the current state of the National Football League, from his speech at a campaign rally in Huntsville, Alabama.
www.thenation.com/…
Many thanks to those whose copy I have stolen: David M. Perry, Al-Jazeera; Sean Gregory, Time; Dave Zirin, The Nation.
And, I’d take a knee with those hulks on the football field — if I thought I could get up again out of the kneel.