My Nostalgia Is Acting Up

Eminem defies NFL and kneels in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick during Super Bowl halftime show https://t.co/XDI07ULqDk

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 14, 2022

They told Slim Shady to please stand up, but Slim Shady said God sent him to piss the world off.

There was a lot of commentary on Twitter about how this half-time show was about my generation, and frankly, we never did say we were going to die before we got old. We said don't you forget about me. And we are getting old, and I wish more of us were getting wise. 

The fucking kids aren't all right. Charlie Kirk thinks the half-time show was full of sexual anarchy. This dumb man-baby must have been peeing in his diapers through the Janet Jackson and Prince half-time shows. He literally comes off like John Lithgow's character in Footloose.  That's two Footloose references I've made this month. I may be getting old. I repeat myself. Matt Walsh, middle aged but younger than me, doesn't know "woke" means aware, and Marshall Mathers is aware he's a white guy who owes a fuckton to Black music and Black people. That he's supposedly making amends for anything else is Walsh's own bullshit. 

I'm glad the convoy asshats didn't come to LA to fuck with the Super Bowl despite what loons like Wendy Rogers and Senator Rand Paul wanted. That would have been a shitshow--all those Confederate flags in LA. I don't think those two remember how things could go, because they forget that urban America is also real America. They think it would scare the shit out of people who live in the cities that right-wing dumbasses think have been burned down by BLM. They forget riots that have happened not even thirty years ago. 

I don't, The truckers don't, either, and they probably know that unlike Ottawa or Windsor, if you go to LA or NY or Philadelphia, you might meet with an entirely different atmosphere that isn't going to wait for police action because nope. Residents will find a way. People have turned out en masse for deceased kids they didn't even know, and some jackasses want to disrupt the shelves at Acme and whether our own kids get fed--are you for real? 

The Fire in Baltimore this Time

There's a "disaster porn" aspect of looking at protests gone off the rails like the protest in Baltimore did last night. The more peaceful aspects of the conflict get underplayed (well, mostly). Following a lead about possible gang violence, the Baltimore police stopped mass transit while schools were being let out, leaving a lot of young people on the street, with not-unpredictable results. 

It's a dumb game though, trying to point out why things went the way they did. Baltimore's protest, like Ferguson before it, and others, is triggered as much by the past as by the latest injustice. Freddie Gray was arrested because he had a knife on him, which isn't in itself a crime. After being placed in the police van, he wasn't belted in and did not get prompt medical care when he expressed a need for it. His neck was broken and his voice box crushed. It looks like he very probably was the recipient of what is sometimes called a "joyride", a "nickel ride", or a "rough ride"--a kind of nasty way of letting police brutality happen "accidentally on purpose". (As opposed to "on purpose-on purpose" which has also been a problem.) And by the numbers, this neighborhood was in trouble.

A change is gonna come

I'd like to think the tide is turned in terms of how LE will be dealing with the protesters in Ferguson now that MO Highway Patrol Capt. Ronald Johnson has been put in charge and is talking with the people and relating to them like people. (This isn't how I would necessarily describe the previous strategy.)

How people are treated has a lot to do with what you get from them. If you lock down and pen in and abuse people, they will go off. Right now, there are numerous protests all over the US in support of justice for Michael Brown.  Learning nothing from fucking up patrolling Occupy, NYPD threatens to fuck up a peace rally patrol.  Seriously--how do you fuck up a peace patrol, says I, a person living in a city where a peace concert naturally had a killing.

Shit is probably fucked up all over, I, being reasonable, admit. But we can all work at it being less fucked, maybe? (Like, once upon a time, shit was so fucked up in my city that a black mayor and a black police commissioner actually dropped bombs on a neighborhood predominantly of color. That should seem nuts. But it is history.)

Look, I want justice all the time. I see something going wrong with our justice system.  There is bias, and I don't care for it. I see black leadership of the LE in Ferguson as a solution to the problem, and think things might have reason to improve.


I hope  I'm right.