Oakland Weariness: Grief and Loss
Oakland: such potential with all of its good and creative citizens. Yet, we fall so often. Five more deaths.
As a fifty-nine year old woman who is often alone at night, I am grateful and respectful of the officers who came to help me twice in the past years because I heard gunshots in my neighborhood or heard someone breaking into a window at night. They were comforting and respectful.
And I am pinky white. I do not forget this. I'm often (not always) treated respectfully. But what I said above has been my most recent experience.
The sadness I feel is for those officers, their families, and co-workers. Co-workers often share things that families don't -- the stresses of work.
I also feel sadness for those who feel so desperate they would kill.
Sadness too, for the community I share. We need strong, true and honest leadership and I feel we do not have it. We need resolve to turn all this violence around and I feel we do not have it.
Stumble It!
posted by Ms. Manitoba @ 11:38 AM
3 Comments:
Jeebus, Ms. M. I've had bad and good experiences with LE, but this past week in Oakland really sucked. Warm hugs.
These officers seemed to be good guys. The sad thing is that the misdeeds of those officers who brutalize people of color probably directly caused the death of two of those officers, who were ambushed and killed because people knew where the perp was hiding, but were afraid to tell the cops because they were afraid of the cops. That is why the common practice of giving cops a free pass for brutality is not good for anybody, not the cops, not the people in the area who just want to go about their lives in peace, and not for society as a whole. It is just vindictiveness for the sake of vindictiveness, the same spiteful "they deserved it" or "oh well, shit happens" silliness that happens whenever you mention civilian casualties in Iraq. It is the same attitude Timothy McVeigh exhibited towards those infants and toddlers in the Oklahoma City day care center that he blew to smithereens, except for some reason it's horrible when a Timothy McVeigh says "oh well, just collateral damage", and not horrible when General Petraeus says the same dadburned thing.
There's just too much violence, too much brutality, too much hating, and too much killing. And you don't end brutality by being even more brutal, because that doesn't work short of genocide. And genocide against Americans by Americans is, thank god, not socially acceptable right now. But something has to change, all these dead bodies, all this violence and hatred, it's wrong.
- Badtux the Morality Penguin
True. It was partly the fault of some cops who are abusive. But it's also caused by fear of retaliation. If you report a perpetrator, you might get attacked by that person or friends of that person. A group of people can terrorize a neighborhood. I was in that situation not too long ago. No one feels safe enough to report their bad behavior ... no one can protect you from them.
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