BroadSnark

On Friday, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA held a press conference about the school shooting in Sandy Hook. Naturally, his suggestion was to put armed guards or police in every school. The liberal internets were immediately abuzz slamming one of their favorite bad guys. But nobody seemed to be mentioning the fact that this “crazy” idea from the “far right” NRA isn’t an idea at all. It’s already here.

“In 2009, according to the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 68 percent of American students reported the presence of security guards or police officers, or both, in their schools,” says the NYT. But those students aren’t being protected by the “good guys” with guns. They are being abused.

A Houston cop broke a kids jaw on the school bus. Another Texas 12-year-old was arrested for spraying perfume. In Connecticut, a kid was tased for allegedly trying to steal a Jamaican patty in the lunchroom. A California 5-year-old was arrested and charged with battery on a police officer. (Yes. You read that correctly. A 5-year-old.) Another California child, this time 7, was pepper sprayed for climbing on a bookshelf. A New York 12-year-old was arrested for the terrible crime of doodling about loving her friends.

These are not isolated incidents. During a three month period in 2011, an average of 5 students per day were arrested in New York. The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing Birmingham schools for their consistent use of pepper spray on students. Civil rights attorneys are suing Meridian, Mississippi for abusing their students’ civil rights so egregiously that even our sad justice department had to intervene. And then, of course, there are all the students and parents who end up in truancy court.

I could spend the rest of my year finding and posting stories like this, despite that fact that most of the incidents don’t get media attention and juvenile cases are sealed for their “protection”. Not that getting rid of school police and security would make all the abuses go away. The Government Accountability Office found hundreds of cases of kids being abused or killed by school staff.

Some students are far more frequently targets for school cops and administrators. More than 90 percent of arrests in New York in the 2011-12 school year were of black and Latino students. All over the country, students of color and students with disabilities are arrested and disciplined at higher rates. “Gay and transgender youth, particularly gender nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their heterosexual counterparts.” 

And if those kids are unlucky enough to end up in juvenile detention, the abuse will only get worse. 12 percent of youth in juvenile facilities say they have been sexually abused, most often by staff. They are also beaten up, denied access to medical care, denied education, put in restraints, locked in solitary for days or weeks at a time, and sometimes killed. This state by state summary is just the tip of the iceberg.

After everyone started commenting on the NRA press conference, I tweeted that New York Times article and said, “Hey buttheads: 68% of students already have sec guards or police in their schools and it is a fucking disaster”. It got more retweets than anything I’ve ever put out there – by a landslide. I followed that up with some of those incidents above and people even tweeted those.

The thing is, I tweet and blog about these things all the time. In fact, almost everything in this post I have put out before. Nobody pays any attention. It seems people only care about this stuff if the NRA says it is a good idea. So thanks, NRA. Perhaps if you had a press conference every day to suggest that we inundate schools with police, arrest all the students of color, and torture kids for not being perfectly socialized automatons then people would notice. Maybe they’d even want to do something about it.

If you pay attention to nothing else in this post, please read this piece on how the government created residential segregation in our cities. De facto my ass.

Red Emma’s in Baltimore is expanding. Please help.

Is giving homeless people cigarettes an ethical dilemma or are Swedish health groups full of shit?

Excellent interview with Victoria Law on The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.

The sexual abuse in prisons is just beyond words.

But hey, at least some nonprofits are getting money from prison labor. (Someday I really need to write a book on nonprofits.)

Yup. Obama is a liberal.

Education is not the answer to poverty.

You have probably read The Woes of an American Drone Operator, but just in case.

Incorporation is collusion.

The inside scoop on how Walmart trains managers to keep the workers in line.

I’ve posted this before, but I feel like No One is Innocent needs a repeat.

And happy end of the world. Looks like Michigan closed 33 schools early in preparation. Hope you all have fun plans.

I had no intention of writing anything about the school shooting in Connecticut. Maybe Pablo Neruda could have found words to talk about something like that, but it is beyond my capacity.

I understand the desire for people to ask how it could happen and how we can prevent it from happening again. But there is a fine line between asking why and using a tragedy to push your pet policy positions or promote your philosophy. It isn’t a line I want to walk.

But then I read this piece on Jezebel and I just can’t let it go.

Some incredibly brave woman wrote about being the mother of a child with serious mental health problems. If you haven’t read I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother yet, do it now.

Try to imagine what it would be like to be that mother. Imagine trying to cope with your kid’s behavior. Imagine the terror every time you hear about a serial killer or mass murderer. Imagine having to wonder – Will I have to put him in prison? Will my kid kill himself? Will he kill me? Will he kill somebody else? What if my only option to stop him from killing me or someone else is to kill him? You know that thought has to have gone through her mind.

If that child ever does anything horrible, the first thing anyone will ask is where the parents were. No. Scratch that. They will ask where the mother was. They will want to assess blame. They will want to dissect every action that woman has taken. They will want to know why nobody was warned.

Well, we have been warned. And we have been pleaded with. That mother put all her anguish out for the world to see. But instead of thinking about how hard that was, how hard it must be to live like that, some compassion-challenged asshat at Jezebel called the woman’s torment a distraction.

A fucking distraction.

According to Laura Beck, we are supposed to leave mental health diagnosis to the experts. But someone whose last posts included World’s Best Airport Pianist and Alison Brie Loves to Rap, Danny Pudi Loves to Beat Box is fully qualified to declare that mental health care needs to take a back seat to gun control. And if that means using someone else’s tragedy and shitting all over a woman’s cry for help. Fuck em.

No. Laura. Fuck you.

I rarely blog anything truly personal, at least not the details. It is so difficult to dig up the most painful things that happen to you and lay them out for the world. And there are too many Lauras out there who can’t even see what it is that they are shitting on.

So when I read something like I am Adam Lanza’s Mother, the only thing I am thinking about is what it would be like to experience that. I’m thinking how fucking hard it would be to share it and how hard it would be to not share it. And I’m thinking – Whatever you do, lady, don’t read the comments!

So, Laura Beck, how about this. How about you take the most awful thing that has ever happened to you in your life and write about it. How about you dredge up all the pain and splay it out for the internets to use and to tear apart and to tell you how your pain is completely besides the point. Maybe then you might find some tiny bit of compassion in there somewhere?

No? Well then stick to writing about airport pianists.

This weekend I got into an argument about music. The person I was arguing with was blasting gangsta rap for glorifying behavior that was ruining their own communities. He even went so far as to say that the music, and everything it stood for, was causing racism.

I went a little apoplectic.

I may not be a huge fan of music that is often violent, materialistic, and misogynist. But I’m not going to blame a musician for white flight, urban decay, omnipresent policing, mass incarceration, the drug war, shitty schools, racist employers… I’m not going to hold a musician responsible for racism because a white supremacist uses them as an excuse. And I am sure as hell not going to accept that kind of blaming coming from someone at the top of the privilege food chain – which he was.

I thought of writing about how racist and classist that shit is. I thought of writing about how difficult it is to balance individual responsibility with structural oppression. But what I really want to write about is having an outlet.

We live in a world that is completely fucked up and filled with pain. Yet we aren’t allowed to express how fucked up it is. We have no strategies for coping with pain. We don’t even want to hear about people’s pain, much less help them deal with it. We don’t want to know what goes on in people’s homes and neighborhoods if it isn’t shiny, happy, and uplifting. And if you have thoughts that fall outside the spectrum of what is socially acceptable, you better hide them or else.

I was filled with rage when I was a teen. And I had a lot less to be raging about than some people. There were times when I had incredibly violent thoughts. There were times when the targets of my anger were wildly off the mark. The only coping mechanisms I ever learned were denial, sarcasm, booze, and flight. I learned to internalize the rage. I drank it, smoked it, snorted it, and walled it off. And I walled off a lot of other emotions with that rage too.

And that’s the way a lot of people like it.

People don’t want to know about your anger, righteous or not. Just take a Xanax and numb it so nobody has to see it. Don’t say anything inappropriate. Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve  Don’t cry in public. Don’t yell. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be destructive. Don’t be embarrassing. Don’t be perverted. Don’t admit that some things might not be fixable. Don’t show people things that they don’t want to see.

And whatever you do, make sure whatever coping mechanisms you have don’t get in the way of you being a good worker bee. Cause if you can’t manage to find and put up with a degrading 9 – 5 that pays your rent and rehab bills, we don’t want to know you.

I may hate violence, but I understand rage. I may hate materialism, but I understand the desire to have things when you’ve had to struggle. I understand that it is hard to live in a society where you gain status through violence and money without internalizing it. And I really understand how difficult it is to even acknowledge a maelstrom of emotions, much less channel them into something constructive. I understand that sometimes you just need to scream some shit out and have some person somewhere acknowledge that what you see is real and it is fucked up.

I’m not saying that cultural products don’t matter. They influence the way we look at the world. We should criticize them. But we can’t blame them for our social ills. Sometimes the most offensive things can start useful discussions. Sometimes a person just needs an outlet to express their emotions, horrible as they may be. If singing about something keeps you from doing it, that’s a good thing. If singing about something makes someone else think they should do it, the problem isn’t the song but the fact that the other person didn’t have an outlet themselves.

We are never going to have a world where nobody thinks terrible thoughts, hates irrationally,  or is just unable to deal with their pain. I don’t think any of us will be alive to see a world without poverty, violence, and oppression. Maybe if we gave people a little more space to express their fuckedupedness, instead of pretending like people pop out of the womb with all the answers and have perfect understanding at age 18, we could minimize the harm we do to ourselves and others.

But instead of trying to understand where the rage comes from and why so many people identify with it, we just tell people to shut up.

I have disappeared again, mostly hiding in a case of vodka. But I have also been helping to put together the benefit show this Saturday. If you are in the area, come out.

Also, there is a protest out at Ft. Meade on Tuesday. The FB event is here.

Took this pic in San Pedro Sula a few years ago. Those guys are on top of the mall. They don’t fuck around with shoplifting in that town. Apparently, SPS is now the most dangerous city in the world. Perhaps they need to rethink their strategies.

What kind of fucktard cares more about putting people behind bars than the life of someone overdosing on drugs?

Kind of a cool project from Act!onAid. Rural people around the world tweeting about their lives and how they are affected by land grabs.

Co-op news is where it is at.

The pope condemns pussy.

I cannot believe that designing a dog park is an actual occupation. Apparently, it is quite a lucrative one. Makes total sense to spend half a million on a place for dogs to shit when thousands of people in this town don’t have a place to sleep.

Don’t ever expect cops to help you.

Don’t expect the border patrol not to shoot teens throwing rocks that don’t even have a snowballs chance in hell of actually getting near them.

Don’t expect the government to ever give an accurate count (or any count) of drone deaths.

Keep up with the California hunger strikers here.

First of all, I would much rather strippers have the money than bankers. And you have to appreciate that the guy didn’t want to show up at the club without being able to pay the women.

Ridiculous that the Sioux have to come up with millions in order to buy back stolen land. But hey, it isn’t like you could expect the federal government to honor a treaty once they discovered gold.

“According to sources, Ryan then insisted that aides rake their fingernails across his chest and spit in his face while calling him a ‘filthy liberal slut.’” Oh Onion.

The Occupy Handbook by Janet Byrne

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I hate this book.

I really tried to give it a chance. But I knew going in that any book about occupy that was compiled by someone described as “an editor who has worked with Nobel Prize-winning economists, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and leading political figures, financial journalists, academics, and bestselling authors” was going to be a shit show. And a shit show it was.

It isn’t that all the essays are crap. Some of them are quite good. The first section breaks down the financial crisis and brings in some history of previous people’s movements. The second section talks about occupy itself. The third section, the part that really sealed my hatred, is about what we should do now.

What are the proposed solutions? Campaign finance reform. Corporate regulations. Environmental regulations. Progressive taxation. Elect a different congress. Smart loans…Are you still awake? The only reason I haven’t passed out from boredom is that I want shake these people until their heads pop off.

Dear asshats who think everything will be solved if we just all rally around one magic, conservative/liberal bullet like ending corporate personhood. Please take your brilliant idea to someone sitting in prison for twenty years on a weed charge, with all the fabulous opportunities they have to look forward to when they get out, and tell them they need to set aside their pet issues (aka their life) and lobby for some bullshit bill. And if you wouldn’t mind filming that for me.

But the contributors to this book weren’t thinking about people in prison. They weren’t thinking about anything that doesn’t affect them. And who are they? There are 66 contributors to this book. Fifteen of them are women. One of those women is just an interviewer. Eight of them are co-authors with some dude. One of those women is Asian. There is one black man who contributed an essay. Three Indians (by which I mean grew up in India) are contributors. 61 of the 66 authors are white (though eight of those people are from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Spain, or Turkey). 52 out of 66 authors have grad degrees. At least 35 of them went to school or taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Georgetown, or Oxford.

This book is the antithesis of what occupy was supposed to be about. The book oozes status, hierarchy, academic circle jerks, and conservative/liberal “solutions” that nip around the edges of the system, but have no interest in actually changing it – much less getting rid of it. This book is the worst kind of racism, sexism, and classism. It is the kind that just erases anyone outside of their tiny, elite circle. It is the kind that wraps itself up in a pretty package of intellectualism.

The reason occupy has been so damn difficult is that the people involved had to confront head on all of the issues that this book ignores – often failing spectacularly. But at least there was some space for people who didn’t have the kind of pedigrees that the contributors to this book have. The reason occupy took off is precisely because it created a space for people to be heard, to negotiate directly with other people, to come up with ideas outside the usual bullshit that kept most of us at home drinking ourselves into stupors and yelling at our televisions.

The last thing we need is a bunch of essays compiled by some woman who creams her pants every time she meets a white dude with a PhD from an Ivy League school.

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Follow CD on his quest for medical marijuana.

Feminists shrunk Rush Limbaugh’s penis. (Typing “Rush Limbaugh’s penis” just made me retch.)

Ladies, if you do exactly the opposite of these tips for single women circa 1938, you too can stay happily unmarried.

Are too strong families bad for society? I think so. The narrower the group you are supposed to care about, the worse it is.

Great post by Astra Taylor on The Prison-Educational Complex. And if you have never seen her talk on YouTube, it is worth a watch.

Two prison hunger strikes in California and Georgia.

If you need any help puking up all the fucked up things the Obama administration has done.

This story about a 13-year-old who murdered his brother is just heartbreaking and a total failure of society.

Using the word rape to describe this and this makes the word seem a tad inadequate.

If you are in the DC area, the POC Zine Project RACE RIOT tour is at St. Stephen tomorrow night from 6 – 10 pm.

By now you have probably read, or at least heard about, Rebecca Solnit’s piece on TomDispatch titled The Rain on Our Parade. Salon republished it as Hey left wing: Quit griping.

Solnit is frustrated that us radicals are constant Debbie Downers who do nothing but bitch and moan. We can never see anything positive. We are ebullience crushing, sanctimonious, disgruntled, sour, bitter, narcissistic, privileged, fools who lack any compassion for the people who will be helped by the incremental policy changes that Democrats will bring us.

Ouch.

I will give Solnit this. I think that radicals are too often better at pointing out problems than offering solutions. I wish that the Criminal (in)Justice Committee spent more time talking about restorative justice and other alternatives to incarceration. People need a positive vision to fight for and not just enemies to fight against.

But the Democratic Party and incremental policy change are not that vision.

I used to be a liberal. I was brought up to believe that the people who voted Republican were all ignorant, racist, homophobic, Christian fundamentalists who were beyond redemption. The implication being that people who voted for Democrats were not those things. The “good” people voted for Democrats and our only option for change was to cross our fingers and hope more people would pick the Democratic Team.

I was excited that my first election put Clinton in office. He wasn’t 250 years old. He wasn’t going to arm Contras. He talked about civil rights and justice. I thought things were going to be different. But they weren’t. In fact, in a lot of ways they got a hell of a lot worse. And I knew that Clinton was about as good as it was going to get. It was a horrible and paralyzing realization.

Contrary to Solnit’s assertion that us radicals fixate on international issues and ignore the national issues that Democrats are better on, it wasn’t international issues that made me give up on Democrats. It was studying drug policy. It was understanding that Bill Clinton was arguably the worst president on the drug war. It was understanding how racist our criminal (in)justice system is and how Democrats (including our current vice president) were front and center pushing the policies that have 7 million people under correctional supervision.

Studying drug policy opened my eyes to other things to. Like that a whole lot of libertarians who voted Republican were actually paying attention to an issue that most liberals didn’t (and still don’t) seem to notice. Here liberals were pretending to care more about poor people and people of color, but (at best) ignoring one of the systems that targets them mercilessly. Suddenly, I had to reassess my view of who was the enemy and who I had common ground with. Suddenly, I found myself in conversations with libertarians and conservatives and people who defied our limited categories.

Losing my liberal baggage and walking away from electoral politics is not about hopelessness or nihilism or sanctimony. Walking away from electoral politics was what finally started to give me some hope. If I kept smashing my head against our electoral system, I would have permanent brain damage from all the political concussions. It isn’t “an excuse for not really doing much.”  It was the opposite. It allowed me to see possibilities that politics keeps hidden. It allowed me to start building the unlikely relationships that the defenders of our hideous systems are rightly terrified of.

I find it incredibly ironic that Solnit says that radicals are being divisive, that we fall into a “cartoonish black and white.” It isn’t just that she says it in an article that has such contempt for us and has understandably pissed a lot of people off. It is that she also talks about how we have to “counter the Republican right.” It is that she talks about how we have to be intelligent and empathetic, unlike those people. How is that not divisive? I no longer see the right as Republican. I certainly don’t see it as the people who vote Republican any more than those who vote Democrat, at least not all of them.

I see the problem as the systems that crush us all – the criminal (in)justice system, the school system that is designed to teach us the futility of resistance, the corporate behemoths who bleed us dry, the thugs with guns here and abroad – and whoever it is that upholds those systems. Any president, or anyone who wants to be president, has the job of conserving those systems. And that means that they are the problem.

I get that sometimes a small policy change can make a real difference in someone’s life. And I do not begrudge the people who work for those changes, even though I believe that they are operating on a gross misunderstanding of how change happens. If a movement is big enough, if the culture shifts, the change will come no matter who is in office. But a politician cannot make change (even if we think they want to) without the movement. The movement is what is important. Solnit herself uses the Montgomery bus boycott as an example. That wasn’t an election. That was direct action. That was a movement.

It is so frustrating to see people buy into the right/left, Democrat/Republican divides that have so little meaning. I can’t stand watching people waste their time begging at the doors of the powerful and watching them be worn down by it.  That is what I find divisive. That is what I find hope killing. That is what keeps us from resolving problems and coming up with creative solutions.

I get frustrated too, Rebecca. Sometimes I need to let out a good rant. I live in DC. I am surrounded by party loyalist “progressives” who focus myopically on the few scraps Obama has thrown and close their eyes to the damage he has done with bombs, bailouts and a total disregard for civil liberties. Sometimes the only response I am capable of is to puke out a damage list. Sometimes, when someone accuses me of being a brat for not being grateful that the person who cut off my arm gave me a band-aid,  I really lose my shit.

So I won’t hold all the insults against you. But I hope the insults and uncharitable assumptions are out of your system now. Because every moment we spend being frustrated at each other’s frustration is one less moment we spend building the relationships and movements that might actually do something.

I always know there is an election coming up when my email and blog reader are filled with stories meant to scare my uterus into a self defensive trip to the voting booth.

This Republican sheriff candidate would shoot women who tried to have abortions. This Republican Senate candidate thinks there shouldn’t be a rape exception because women can’t get pregnant from rape. (Never mind if either of them win.) These asshats introduced a bunch of anti-abortion legislation. (Never mind if it got passed). Don’t you understand how much republicans hate women? Better go give Obama some money.

I’ve been saving all the “Republicans hate women” posts for a month. I had so many they crashed my web browser when I tried to pull them all up. Emily’s List even has this fancy War on Women graphic. Apparently, war is only an election topic when it refers to cutting funding for abortions. It isn’t like we need to talk about Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or the worldwide war on drugs.

Abortion voters – Let me explain why you are, at best, wasting your time.  While you have been out fear voting for president and panicking about whether or not SCOTUS will overturn Roe v. Wade, states and cities have been regulating abortion out of existence. Instead of writing screeds about how misogynistic republicans are and putting all your energy into presidential elections, maybe you could try talking to the women that those republicans are appealing to.

Because candidates like Romney become “pro-life” when they run for president in order to appeal to the millions of people who don’t support abortion rights. And not all those people are men. Have you ever observed the yearly march for life in DC? Thousands come out for that. And the majority seem to be women.

But I guess it is easier to ignore those women and write them off as brainwashed.

I hate what those women believe. I think they are incredibly misguided. But dismissing them as tools of politicians or popes is as obnoxious as thinking all sex workers are passive victims who need to be rescued. Abortion rights are not in danger because of Mitt Romney. They are in danger because the 1.5 million women who live in Mississippi aren’t out in the streets trying to stop their last remaining abortion clinic from being regulated out of existence. And that is what people should be focused on.

Who becomes president isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference. So all your scare emails are bullshit.

I don’t only get scare emails about abortion. Women’s health is the thing this year. 16.8 million dollars have been poured into political advertising on the subject. Today, Planned Parenthood wants me to #askmitt a bunch of questions about women’s health. Oddly, I don’t notice any questions about the health effects of incarceration, indefinite detention, or bombings. But I guess then we would have to ask Obama too and we can’t have that.

Meanwhile, Mitt is telling women that his party is going to give us economic opportunity. Because you too can step all over people and earn gazillions of dollars in the process. Then you don’t have to worry about unplanned pregnancy, cause you can just hire some poor woman to take care of those kids for you. Democrats are no better. Former Obama administration official Anne-Marie Slaughter explains how challenging it is to climb the ladder of success, sip champagne with important people, and still manage to raise kids. If only we had better daycare or slightly more flexible hierarchical jobs, then even more of us could make our dreams of champagne and nannys a reality.

The worst is when the male politician’s bullshit doesn’t quite stick and they trot out the wife. We are supposed to believe that George W. Bush can’t be that bad. I mean look how lovely Laura is. She is a woman who really knows her place. And what about that Michelle Obama speech at the democratic convention. She didn’t mention anything about her husband’s bank bailouts, but look how glamorous she is. Doesn’t it make you want to buy a new dress and head for the polls?

Sometimes the politicians will even throw a woman in the race to get us excited. Because once a woman is in power, everything will change. You know. Just like after Thatcher got elected. The only thing more torturious than hearing non-stop coverage of Sarah Palin last election is reading shit about how Hillary is god.

If you would rather burn the ladder than climb it. If you actually care about the lives of all people and not just fetuses or middle class women in the United States. If you are disgusted by politicians bombing women under the guise of protecting them. If you understand that good things don’t happen from the top down. Then there is nothing for you in politics, especially not in presidential elections.

Going to the polls because “at least he supports abortion rights” is like staying with some shitbag guy because “at least he doesn’t beat me.”  Fine. That’s better. But could we raise our expectations just a smidge?

I need some election strength midol.