Friday, December 5, 2014

Brutality. Police and otherwise.

We've heard a lot of late about police brutality.

But that phrase downplays the bigger problem we're facing in America.

Police have acted brutally not merely because they are ill-trained or tainted by racism. It's worse than that.

There is police brutality because we pay them to "protect" a brutal society.

Our society is brutal because we don't pay millions of people a living wage.

Our society is brutal because we permit the greatest inequality of income distribution in the world.

Our society is brutal because we underfund schools, and nutrition, and hospitals, and housing.

Our society is brutal because we allow the financial institutions to prey on the poor in the form of sub-prime mortgages, usurious credit card and pay-day loan rates and more.

Our society is brutal because we have created an underclass that will never escape its poverty and deprivation.

Our society is brutal because we've allowed the top 1% to have more than the bottom 90%.

If you look back to America's first Gilded Age, similar conditions existed. And cops and Pinkertons behaved in a brutal way. Haymarket. Cripple Creek.

If you look back to the flowering of the KKK and lynching in the 1920s, you'll see similar brutality.

We have created a brutal world.

The cops are only policing accordingly.


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