Day 1309 of 1456

Day 1309 of 1456 in trump’s America.

“Abolish the police” was not a phrase that I ever thought could hold any real political weight in my lifetime. It was part of the utopian cloud of phrases I thought about, like Galactic Federation or Dissolving Capitalism. It’s strange how a time lived with so much violence could also float on a current of so much hope, all at the same time. Combine that with the fact that never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that anything that happened in Minnesota would be impetus for it all. History was like a thing that happened around the edges of the Midwest, and we’d just sit quietly, hoping to be invited.

We burned down a police precinct. That has literally never happened in American history. When has Minnesota been recorded as being first for any kind of justice action, on anywhere near the same caliber, in all its 162 year lifespan? Other than a handful of Bob Dylan albums, and being the only state to not vote Republican in 1984, “Causin’ Trouble” has never really been our state motto. Either that’s how bad things have gotten, or Minnesota is ahead of the curve of something for once, compared to the rest of the country. Either possibility is hard to comprehend.

And now we’re going to defund the police. We’re going to take away their toys. Serious, sober, boring politicians are talking about putting communities back in the hands of community members. Something that has literally only been done once in American history – in 2013, when Camden, New Jersey did what we are trying to do. Keeping in mind that Minneapolis does not have different problems than Camden had, but it does have more than 5 times the population. This is a Major Metropolitan City, one of the top 50 biggest cities in the country. I haven’t read much of the results from Camden – again, not a real journalist, no one’s paying me to write this, and you are getting what you pay for – but a cursory glance shows a significant drop in most of their violent crime since then.

I’ll tell you what I am reading – and since no one’s reading this, I can safely vent about the facts without being self-conscious that someone might think I’m literarily virtue signaling – and that’s two books, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Both started about 5 days before George Floyd was murdered. Yeah, I know, serendipitous, right? Apparently the last couple of weeks is all my fault. I did not know that the universe was using my personal reading list as a setup for its punchlines. If I had known, I would have started something more genteel, like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Gentleman’s Guide to the Golden Age of Blowjobs.

I’m not going to stretch this bullshit out any further than I need to. This is still only supposed to be fun for just me, so I’ll just get to the closing statement. One of the books – Invisible Man – is about a never-named black main character who is constantly seen by other people as everything in the world (slave, savior, token, worker, godless primitive, sex maniac, social taboo, union worker, union breaker, puppet, threat, and disappointment), everything except a human being. It’s an amazing book, one that I’d suggest every cop in America look into if I thought they could read.

The other one – A People’s History of the United States – is the strangest motivation to write that I’ve ever found. It’s a compendium of hundreds of years of written history of things that took place on the American continent – but the specific part below Canada, above Mexico, and between the oceans – as told by attempting to historically represent American Indigenous People, African slaves, women, farmers, industrial workers, unskilled labor, and every other racial and economic minority from 1492 up to the almost-present of the early 2000s. Over 500 years of struggle, some victories, mostly failures. Mostly the underhanded attempts to get the oppressed people in question to strike “compromise” just enough to get them to stop setting everything on fire forever, which is something that we apparently every so often remember we are totally capable of.

The thing I notice when I read this book is that none of this would be known – I wouldn’t even be reading it if Zinn hadn’t written it, if the sources he gleaned hadn’t written their books before him, and if the original sources hadn’t written it down when they were boots on the ground in the first place when these things happened – if no one had recorded anything. And every single person, names mostly lost in time, who wrote those things – reporting from the front lines when cops were clubbing strikers, or bringing machine guns on mothers and children in bread lines, or rolling tanks on war veterans in homeless camps – was writing in opposition to a thousand other people writing for the other side of the fight, the one that said that everything was going perfectly fine and no one has any reason to complain.

Sometimes it feels like the whole of human history is that battle played out a hundred times an hour, everywhere. People who think it’s good enough and the people who don’t. And if it wasn’t written down, we’d be even worse off right now. We’d be even more lost.

So everything is almost within our grasp again. We have another chance to climb another rung higher to ascend to our ultimate liberty, as they say. And just like always, we are the ones who can make these decisions. All the power is ours. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is trying to get things back to normal. They’ve done it before. Luckily someone was there to write it all down every time. A people’s right to their own agency includes solving their problems the way they want them to be solved. Every time it is diverted, it circles back again. Every time, for over 500 years.

We have all the power here. Or, to put it more precisely, we have as much power as we think we do.