Recruitment in these times

I was walking my dog tonight and I saw this on the ground:

 

#chalkedunarmed

This weekend was coined Ferguson October by Hands Up United the group that has organized around the August shooting of African American teenager, Mike Brown. I can only assume the Sean Bell memory is in solidarity.

The national attention Ferguson is receiving is inspiring and the relentless passion of the protesters on the ground - many young people who have grown up under the constant harassment of Missouri police - makes me believe change is inevitable. I am also scared. I am scared for the people putting their bodies on line. I am also scared that some concessions will be made, that some weak words on documents will be composed and offered as a resolution, and things will return to the way they were. To the way they have always been.

I don't know that Raw Fiction offers an alternative. Personally, I am not a front-line activist. I used to think it would be my lifestyle, but I became another cog in the machine, more or less. At least Raw Fiction offers an alternative to status quo youth programming. And some brightness in my life.

I'm not certain what I'm getting at today, tonight, in this entry.

I am so beyond my threshold with all of the stories of police brutality and the deaths of young black men, women and children. And I am disgusted by all the layperson vigilantes. The crazy racists who call the police and the psychopaths who take it upon themselves to shoot children.

Tonight, I am writing to make my stand clear. I stand with the protesters in Ferguson. I stand against police brutality and all the mechanisms of the racist infrastructures that contain us while silencing the most crucial voices.

That is why I am writing tonight. For Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismund and Assata Shakur and Mumia and my uncle. For all of those whose lives have been taken and ruined, whether they were simply living in it or actively fighting against it, by the system that profits, continues to profit and has only ever profited on the exploitation and oppression of human bodies, the land, the air, animals, and, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut: and so on.