"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 5, 2010

The Other Way Around

Oscar Grant was sentenced to death, today. 

[how it would have gone, had Grant shot Mehserle]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is one of those times it sucks to agree with you. But agree I must. Does the inequity strike enough people, and strike them deeply enough?

Jack Crow said...

Charles,

I don't think many people really care. Perhaps I'm jaded beyond all sensibility; but the popularity of cop shows would seem to confirm my impression. Americans root for uniformed thugs, especially when they're fucking up the Other...

Respect,

Jack

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that's why it sucks to agree with you. Because it means most everyone else just doesn't care. And they are the ones who will say,

"What are you talking about, civil rights infractions and personal privacy invasions? If you are a good honest citizen you have nothing to fear because you have nothing to hide."

That I have to live among such people, and that they have to be in the majority, this is not an uplifting point of reality.

Rachel said...

Agreed, Charles. It was having repeated discussions like the above, in law school that shocked and horrified me enough to drop the last shreds of my "good moderate"-ness. I went into criminal defense, and the reaction of most upstanding, self-described liberal citizens to learning this is always to crinkle their noses like I've just farted. It is very sad.