The police kill citizens in the United States. The bodies speak for themselves. And we should not turn them into mere body counts; we should know their names. Even so, some type of blinking counting calculator, like the one that tracks the national debt, would help place this state-sanctioned violence into perspective.
The horror is that the very people who are supposed to protect you can kill you. This undermines, overturns, overthrows all that we believe in as Americans. When the blue line gets defensive — and, before the dust settles, asks for justice for their families, though they did not speak in the same language about the families of the people that their officers just shot — it rings hollow. The gap between citizens and their protectors turns into a ringing noise that echoes through a Death Valley, or a Grand Canyon, bouncing off cliffs in unexpected ways.
As Norman Stamper, Seattle’s police chief during the 1999 anti-globalism uprising, said, we don’t want to be civilians — we are citizens. And we don’t want our 18,000 police precincts to be militarized, making us all just what — collateral damage?
The ringing noise indicates how great this crisis of legitimacy is in the United States — including not just the sitting government, the presumed elected government, or the hopeful government. It’s a crisis on both sides of American politics — the political process (elections), and what the election achieves (governance). Police brutality betrays the most basic relationship — that between the citizen and the state.
The national election is not legitimate when Republicans nominate someone like Donald Trump — who scares the whole world, not just Democrats or “Feel the Bern Democrats.” Even Republicans who get poked by Trump refuse to back down and won’t support him. Even the Koch brothers refuse to give him any of their $898 million.
This is not to say you can relax. No. No. No. The Republican money is going darker, it’s getting shoved into little dark holes — that is, smaller races. Think of this like rats — nesting, gnawing, biting babies or the elderly in the deep caverns of government — municipal elections where no one participates, where corruption runs rampant from Minnesota to Texas, from New York and New Jersey to Louisiana, and from Nevada to Montana, then down to Arizona, and back up to Oregon.
It is the politicians from these races that cause the most harm — kill the most people they were democratically elected to serve. Balanced as they were President Obama’s words can not console the nation enough. Meanwhile, Democratic contender Hillary Clinton is out of step in referencing President Lincoln‘s words. They do not resonate — at least this the July convention month. #
Ruth Frick O'Brien 