Friday, May 01, 2020

"These Are Very Good People"


These are very good people ... Talk to them. ... Give a little.









A.R. Moxon:
Imagine if these people ever faced actual oppression.

***

Imagine they didn't clearly know that police brutality is something reserved for other people.

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Imagine instead they lived with an innate sense, delivered to them at a young age, that in most places they would be assumed a threat, where their very presence, however benign, might draw immediate lethal response.

Imagine they didn't think of the world as their possession.

***

Imagine they had to worry about what their tone said about them.

Imagine they had to worry about what their clothes said about them.

Imagine they were always told they needed to smile more.

Be more positive.

***

Imagine they had to fight simply to be perceived as human enough to deserve the basics of what our country has to offer human beings, which is a freedom to live.

Imagine they weren't fighting instead, quite literally to prevent others from living, to serve their own ease.

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Imagine if they couldn't presume themselves the first priority of any situation, the natural heroes of any given moment, the experts on any given subject, simply by existing.

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Imagine if well-paid coddled professional scolds made their careers by scolding them: for incivility, for living in a bubble, for their blinkered prejudices against "real America."

Presupposing a "fake America."

Meaning them.

***

Imagine if "Real America" stopped implicitly meaning them and only them, a state of being, a primacy of place which others could never hope to access. Imagine if "Real America" started meaning *everybody.*

Can you imagine it?

They'd start shooting.

That's what the guns mean.

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