Enough!

A writer has a conversation with an article about police unions.

A writer has a conversation with an article about police unions.

By

[This is a third article from our guest writer who does not wish to make his identity known. I refer to him as G, a retiree who moved to Bellingham over 15 years ago. His previous pieces were MintTheCoin - Money for Everyone and A Pandemic and a Depression. The paragraphs below followed the publication of a Guardian article entitled “Revealed: Police unions spend millions to influence policy in biggest US cities” which posited that police unions work against reform. What you read below is a conversation the author has with the article. What conversation might you have with this article? D. Conoboy]


For more than 40 years, at local and federal levels, cities and the U.S. government (protection racket operators), and corporations (the beneficiaries of the racketeers), have worked in unison to bust labor unions while at the same time protect police unions. The governmental and corporate motivation for protecting police is self-evident. This has harmed both the welfare and lives of citizens and the minds and hearts of police.

*****

I propose we should regard those protestors who do damage to property rather differently than most of us now do. Millions of Americans live in a state of lifelong anxiety that massive studies have repeatedly shown causes deterioration of both physical and mental health. Prolonged anxiety shortens lives. What is not mentioned is what occurs when anxiety abruptly ceases, as for instance, when wars end or during great uprisings and protests which bring people together in strikingly unusual agreement and purpose with one another. They abruptly feel free. The experience is ecstatic and previously unknown to most of those feeling it. It releases tremendous energy and behavioral wildness. I recall what I saw on the streets of Kansas City, Missouri, when WWII ended - I was only 13, but was alone and participating with the masses of adults around me who were doing things I’d never observed. I recall something of what I felt, too, because I, as were all the others, was suddenly free and experiencing what every modern society forbids, a tribal joy spontaneously and totally independent of cultural mores and restrictions, free of judging myself and others, of having to measure my behavior, of concern about being punished, of illnesses and fears. The ancient Greeks and early Romans scheduled Dionysian rites for themselves, Orphic and Bacchic orgia during which they cleansed themselves of the trials, tribulations and property focused loneliness of civilization, not so that they could destroy or abandon their cities, but rather so that they could better them with more understanding selves, more music, more art, more beautiful architecture and happiness. Socrates and Plato participated in orgia, and during them - we can be certain - discovered priceless things about themselves and what was possible.

Later governments in Greece and Rome acted to prevent the orgia, as modern nations still do. Thus the mystery of the gods in ourselves is known to few of us. We believe God owned the property, including the tree and fruit, in Eden, and that only obedience to, and worship of, the owner will allow us to deserve or receive the bounty of nations and Earth. In our laws, our debts are more sacred than ourselves, and in our laws those who own our debts are our rightful masters. Debt is holy, even when it strangles a nation, as it often does and has done since at least the time of Buddha, then Christ, and later Mohammed (each of whom sought to free us from much of it because they knew that debt was a means of controlling the people who make the wealth we produce by our labor move upward to self-fashioned elites.) The intellectuals, who know what money is, are ignored and insulted by the rich and their politicians and institutions because what they tell us money is enables them to control us at our expense. We keep worshiping the rich, dreaming of becoming one of them, voting for their politicians and believing we are being educated by their TV, news, religious and other institutions, because we’ve been convinced their definitions and uses of money are correct and necessary, and our small take is all that is honestly possible. Indeed, most of us do not know that another definition and body of uses even exists or could, in any degree, be respectable.

*****

No one need tell me that a few of the rats among us are at celebrations and protests. I know that as well as anyone does. Likewise, there are giant rats in the Edens of the White House, Congress, state and city governments, mansions and corporations who use the existence of smaller rats to beat all of us down in order to make themselves rich and powerful no matter the visibly horrific cost to us. Joy of life is not a commodity that belongs only to some class of persons, much less a class which long, long ago monetized it and by impoverishing many of us in order to own it, making it inaccessible to billions, generation upon generation down centuries. If you are an American or a Brit, poor, unable to pay your water bill and threatened, because of that, to be garnisheed or get a lien placed on your house, or you were born in one of the many concentration camps called ghettos because you are Black or Brown, the elites will tell you that you chose to be poor and are solely to blame. Really. And what social problem does that solve? None. It only fills dumpsters and prisons with human beings.

*****

I do not write for elites. I owe them nothing. My labor, yours and the toil of our forebears gave them what they possess and refuse to share. I decline to be the servant or spokesperson of those to whom my late wife and I gave the privileges they hoard, as you also gave them. I will defend them against being murdered, treat them kindly, and forgive them for seldom knowing, and usually being blind to, what they do (as most humans are), but never would I protect them from being humbled and reduced by us. One knows what enough is when one has experienced too much. That is as true for whole societies as it is for an individual. Yes, I know it may already be too late and that runaway-capitalism has sealed our fate, but abandoning any effort at all to gain what would be better for us is an absolutely sure way to lose it. The possible, you know, is like love: Pursuing it may turn out to have been foolish, but Oh! what it pays when it turns out to have been wise.

Enough.

About Guest Writer

Citizen Journalist • Member since Jun 15, 2008

Since 2007, this moniker has been used over 150 times on articles written by guest writers who may write once or very occasionally for Northwest Citizen, but not regularly. Some guest writers [...]

Comments by Readers

Kurt Sperry

Jul 13, 2020

You sound like you’ve been reading David Graeber, great rant!

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Janet Lutz-Smith

Jul 13, 2020

I’m at a loss for words to say what my reaction is to the mysterious contributor! 

The references to ancient peoples doesn’t seem really relevant for us, today! 

We are truly on the brink of ending life on this Planet we call Earth. 

And, many people are taking it as a JOKE! 

When he finally came to the end of his rant and said the word

capitalism I finally began to understand. BIG MONEY!  versus workers who just need 

to be paid for the work they do, to survive. 

It is a sad story to tell and some in society around the world are beginnng to listen! 

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Dick Conoboy

Jul 13, 2020

Kurt,

I will pass your comment to G.  Thanks.

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Larry Horowitz

Jul 13, 2020

I agree with much that our esteemed Guest Writer has observed. But I don’t agree with the claim that an economic system, like a market-based economy or capitalism, is the enemy.

The enemy are those who manipulated the system to concentrate extreme wealth among an infinitesimally small number of powerful families. The oligarchs. The criminal cabal. The shadow government.

These families have long planned for a globalist New World Order controlled by a One World Government.  Their plan is to eliminate the sovereignty of nation states. Socialism is one of their tools.

Understanding that few, if any, NWC readers will watch these videos, I nevertheless link to them for those with open minds.

G. Edward Griffin: The Quigley Formula

Kevin Shipp: Shadow Government & Deep State Officials Exposed

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Dick Conoboy

Jul 15, 2020

Here are replies from the author, G,  to the comments above:

Hello, Mr. Sperry. Thanks for liking my essay, for which you used the word ‘rant’. Rant has quite a different definition & assortment of unpleasant connotations than the word, essay, which refers to writing in which one employs one’s own experiences & emotions in an effort to better understand something, which is my usual practice when writing about my silent conversations with the voices, experiences, beliefs, descriptions, proposals & arguments in things I read, hear or see.

As you suggest, I am familiar with the (classical) anarchist & anthropologist David Graeber, but much more familiar with anthropology from the great teacher Franz Boas through the very important philosopher/anthropologist Marvin Harris, whose theory of cultural economic materialism fits perfectly with Darwinism & thus provides a much needed unified perspective of biological & human cultural reality & evolution. Graeber’s anarchism is indeed attractive, because it provides a workable model of how humanity could be organized & sustainable until, so to speak, the sun grows cold. A quick example of that genuine possibility exists in a honeybee hive, which has no boss or hierarchical class of bosses controlling the behavior of its denizens & extracting wealth from their labor & thus causing inequality & all the horrors that follow from inequality. What the hive has instead is a queen who freely gives the entirety of the bounty she produces - bounty enabled by workers; namely, her eggs - back to all the residents of the community. The queen gives no commands, has no enforcers or tax collectors, is dependent on no billionaires, & is backed up by no house of representatives nor senate of selfish, preening aristocrats. However, a very recent discovery appears to indicate that the queen(s) do give one command:

How honeybees perform queen duets
Scientists using highly sensitive vibration detectors have decoded honeybee queens’ “tooting and quacking” duets in the hive. Worker bees make new queens by sealing eggs inside special cells with wax and feeding them royal jelly.

The queens quack when ready to emerge - but if two are free at the same time, they will fight to the death. So when one hatches, its quacks turn to toots, telling the workers to keep the others - still quacking - captive [Open link to hear them].

 I’d appreciate anything you might say about why you saw Graeber’s views in my essay.

Hi, Ms Lutz-Smith, You may read my response above to Mr. Sperry regarding the word ‘rant’ & the correct one, ‘essay’.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that what has happened to workers(& I must add, the unemployed & unemployable) “is a sad story to tell and some in society around the world are beginnng to listen!” 

Analytic philosophy is concerned with revealing the consequences of events, public policies, laws, beliefs & propositions (sentences). I return to ancient Greece because something that existed there was lost, & the loss of it had large consequences throughout most of the rest of Western history; namely, what was lost was the cultural belief that human happiness & equality is more important than the acquisition, protection & maintenance of property (wealth). I don’t like to sound too academic, abstract or dense so let me suggest that the following video explains & depicts the consequences of what was lost. I promise it’s a fascinating & accurate 22 minute film of how & why Modern policing was set up to protect the powerful from a ‘criminal underclass’. The website is Aeon, a non-profit organization headquartered in London, UK, devoted to scholarly essays. The history of American policing fits hand in glove with that in the U.K: See video here.

Greetings, Mr. Horowitz, My thesis was - & remains - that the first cause of social inequality & its enormous consequent effects is not as you suggest capitalist evil doers, mobsters, conspirators & the politicians they corrupt but something else entirely; namely, the most basic enculturated belief of almost all civilizations (ancient city states & modern nations) that some few of us, be they shop owners, petty managers, kings, aristocrats, slave owners, politicians, or the super rich or their corporations & CEOs are possessed of a right to extract riches from persons & their labor; &  furthermore are thereby entitled to surveil, punish with police, prisons, war & the Hell of state religions those who fail in any way to agree, obey & submit to commands. Market capitalism which you approve of & which I assume you believe can be controlled by liberal [political regulation is the .38 revolver, but it is not the gun’s bullets. The bullets are the hierarchy of explosive propertied power, wealth, social control & the right to manufacture poverty & every other form of inequality that is embedded in the chambers of classical liberalism from Cicero to John Locke, Thomas Jefferson & Thump. Since I assume that it is very improbable you will cease defending market capitalism & attributing its evils only to miscreants, you need not reply to anything I say, but I’d very much like to hear more about truths you glean or believe are clarified in the 2 YouTube videos you recommended to everyone. 

And of course I recommend to you the film linked above in my reply to Ms. Lutz-Smith. 

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