Tag: police brutality

Monday’s Theme Music

We had a Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police protest and march in Ashland this weekend. My wife and I didn’t attend; her underlying health issues increase her vulnerability.

But we drove down to check it out. Hundreds attended. It was peaceful. Most — probably ninety-plus percent — were masked but social distancing wasn’t observed, so mixed bag. Holding our breath on that as the case count continues rising in Oregon.

Young and old, Black, White, Asian, and Latino marched. Later, as we talked about it during “Sixty Minutes”, my wife asked, “Why do we need to keep doing this? When will it permanently change?”

Good question, one that stayed with me this morning. The question prompted a recall of a 2007 Foo Fighters song and video, “The Pretender”. Dave Grohl said in interviews that 2007’s political unrest influenced him when he wrote it. Watching the video, well, you see the same themes as in 2020: protests, taking a knee, confronting police, violence escalating.

Big difference exist between now and 2007. Videos emerge almost weekly of police killing people, almost always Blacks, for little provocation. Too many times, it was brushed aside, hidden again and again. But as it’s happened, it’s just become, too much. The expression, “Black Lives Matter”, arose to express the gulf we see as Blacks were killed or had the police called by Whites for being black. The expression, “Being Karen”, became the code for privileged White people who called the police for such a list of shocking reasoning about why Black people weren’t supposed to be there, or why they were a threat.

“The Pretender” speaks to these things. All those things done by the police hat were hidden or protected are being exposed, again, again, and again. That’s the momentum that keeps this wheel spinning, and will until, finally, Black Lives Matter.

Send in your skeletons
Sing as their bones go marching in again
They need you buried deep
The secrets that you keep are at the ready
Are you ready?
I’m finished making sense
Done pleading ignorance, that whole defense
Spinning infinity, boy
The wheel is spinning me
It’s never ending, never ending
Same old story

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

A bit of contra programming for myself today. Reading the news and watching videos of protesters losing eyes from police firing rubber bullets into crowds sickens me. Some respond, well, the protesters shouldn’t have been there. I disagree. They have the right to assemble right included in the bill of rights. Why huge police forces must escalate with violence is the disturbing part. Fighting fascism, the fascists say in classic double-speak.

It’s all hard to handle, which kicked the Black Crowes’ cover of the song by the same title into my music stream. Otis Redding wrote and recorded the song, and it’s been covered by many since the song’s first release in 1968. I enjoyed Otis Redding’s version and found the BC’s cover was a fatter, slightly up-tempo version that works for me. So here it is, from 1990.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Back to life for today’s music.

Reading, hearing, and thinking about many black people’s comments yesterday and this morning, I realize (again, sadly) how often they live in tension and fear.

Yet, so many whites do as well – as witnessed by them recorded on videos calling police on blacks just because they’re black.

Blacks have a foundation for their fears; we’ve seen too many videos of police applying unnecessary force and violence on black people, or white people getting away with violence against black people, because, white…black.

As we watch and protest, counter-protest, or hold our breaths and wait, I thought about people and praying, and stumbled into Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” (1986). The song is about a couple who have nothing but each other, who are hoping to make it together. As noted many times, the song was written during the Reagan era as trickle-down economics were touted. As we know, trickle-down is a bullshit theory that enables the wealthy to get wealthier and provides a cop-out to others, permitting them to issue tax cuts to the wealthy without remorse. (Yeah, and it certainly worked during the coronaivirus in America, as the wealthier managed to increase their wealth while a huge swath of Americans struggle between buying food or paying rent/house payments.)

Anyway…

Seems like, with high-unemployment, a corrupt Republican administration, continuing police brutality and militarization, protests, looting, riots, and then natural disasters AND the novel coronavirus, many in the United States are living on a prayer.

And that’s why it’s today’s theme music.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is an Queen song from 1970, “Keep Yourself Alive”.

Keep yourself alive was my reflection to watching protests grow into riots as police and others escalate the situation. It’s been an ongoing mutter in my head as we deal with the novel coronavirus situation. Why practice social distancing, masking, isolation, and good hygiene? Well, to mitigate spreading the virus, to gain time to understand it, to gain time to allow our healthcare systems the chance to cope with it, and well, to keep ourselves alive until a vaccine can be found.

Thought it works well on this first day of June in the year of the riots and COVID-19.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Watching the riots remind me of my youth. Born in 1956 in the U.S., we had riots frequently in the sixties.

This month’s riot began when George Floyd, a black man, was apprehended by police, and died, allegedly for something involving forged documents.

Death by police officer is surely the response for such a heinous suspicion, right?

Watching police brutality in 1971, Obie Benson questioned what he was seeing. With Al Cleveland and Marvin Gaye, the thoughts were put into a song that became a Marvin Gaye hit. At that time, protesters were standing up against the Vietnam War. Police, demonstrating the restraint that we’ve come to know well from them, waded in, resulting in what became known as “Bloody Thursday”.

We’ve seen it many times; protests arise. Unless you’re white and armed (see Michigan this year), the police are gonna come hard. (Didn’t help that the POTUS (ever thoughtful and considered in his response) said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” quoting the Miami police chief from the 1967 riots).

The government is by the people and for the people, until the people speak up against the government (unless, again, you’re armed and white in the woke United States) (witness the frequency of armed white males killers with automatic weapons being peacefully apprehended), then look out, people.

Marvin Gaye’s song says it well:

[Verse 1]
Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today, yeah

[Verse 2]
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today

[Chorus]
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on
What’s going on
Yeah, what’s going on
Ah, what’s going on

h/t Genius.com.

BTW, this post was created with the new WP editor. Initial question: WTF did it need to change? Evolutionary improvements, I understand. I thought the other was an intuitive system. Now they want me to ‘insert blocks’, which include such common blocks such as ‘paragraphs’. Christ.

Their little floating block editor jumps in front of text, forcing you to navigate around it to see WTF is going on.

Grrrr.

Here is “What’s Going on”.

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