Remember Those Orders, Officer.

Officer, the next time the mayor tells you to go shove it, the next time they threaten to negotiate your contracts by firing masses of you and your fellow cops, remember all the kids you beat, remember all the girls you clubbed and shoved to the ground this past weekend. Remember all the people who you maced in the name of “order.” Remember all of the people you committed acts of violence against. Remember those people you hit in the face for exercising their right to assemble.

I don’t think you’ll so easily forget: it’s the people you are beating up.

Exactly who is it that you serve and protect, officer?
Who are you going to beat up over the nagging voices in your head?
Who are you going to beat up when you realize what end of the leash you are on?
-SJ

New Post.

It's been months.

But I'm back and I'll try to remain as long as it's sane to do so or as long as I'm able, which will be hard to do any case. I'm lucky enough to be working full time in this America.

Times are bad, times are hard; not as bad or as hard as they've ever been for our scurrying clawing species, nor as bad or as difficult as they will ever be... but when the king and pope of the Nixon-era goons, Dick Cheney, walks about freely, talking about himself in whatever fictional set of reappraisals he thinks most flattering and exculpatory, and it passes for fact in the minds of the many dimwits who oppose only the things that don't make them feel good about themselves and their country...

You and I had better do something, because an entire generation of people in our armed services are either maimed or dying daily. It's happening right now, right this second. They are our best and our brightest by sheer numbers alone, and they are being sacrificed to secure the fortunes of the elite rich in this country and the various industries those elites control: industries that do not even make it a priority to create jobs for this nation. Haliburton's name never comes up on the subject of job creation, but they sure have gotten rich off of these wars by exploiting the manpower and lives of the world's most powerful and capable military. Never forget that military is made up of single, individual human beings who have forsaken their rights as individuals in trusting that the Pentagon, and the Congress it answers to will never send them into lethal conflict unless it is absolutely necessary to protect their nation.

The 2000s were not that long ago, friends. I'm not entirely convinced they ended, not in any way that really counts; Not with two wars, a bank-ruled economy and a new squad of candidates talking about God and protecting the interests of the Rich... not with Rupert Murdoch's vile corporation beaming its lies and propaganda to the gullible and the willing, while it's been making a mockery of those most basic of its readers' rights: privacy.

I'm just a writer living in the 21st century, and that's what I can do: write. I can point out problems, I can point out the criminals masquerading as administrators and politicians from my own subjective corner of the fray. Maybe the best I can do is point out one single problem over and over again.

This is a problem I first noted at the age of six, when I overheard at the dinner table that my mother was being exploited, not by some company or global corporation, but by another immigrant with a different vision, a fucktard eden of their very own in the suburban hinterlands, a cul de sac in Massapequah perhaps, all dreams fueled by theft. For this vision of a better life of their own, they (these contractors who approached unemployed single women at labor offices and the port authority) skimmed thousands of dollars from workers, paying them below their government mandated minimum wage, and pocketing the difference. When a RICO-justified raid shut down the factory that my mother had worked at, she had by then already put herself through college and was working as an office assistant for a non-profit public defense fund in lower Manhattan. I can tell you as her only child, that a single dollar would have made a difference in those early days, and those thieving motherfuckers took much more than that from her wages, a lot more.

Back to that single problem of ours... The problem is simple as are most problems that we really, (in our hearts if not our minds) actually want to solve. The problem is that we are always ready to exploit people far ahead of just leaving them alone. We're always ready and eager to make something off somebody, well ahead of just letting them be.

-SJ