Look around you, scroll through Twitter, attend a peaceful demonstration against police brutality, call your representatives. What do all these things have in common? That’s right they mean absolutely nothing to the officials who have the power to change the situation you are upset about. All of these politicians and highfalutin capitalists and lobbyists have no interest in The Working Man. This is where neoliberalism fails in its attempts to band-aid over the necrotic wound we dare call a society. This is where conservatism fails; with its pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap rhetoric, simultaneously robbing those who need to pull themselves up of said bootstraps they allegedly need to pull themselves up. In action (or inaction) is where we all fail to change the material conditions of the world around us.
The powers-that-be do not give a single flying fuck about the well-being of the working class. Hashtag Resistance is a noble, yet purely symbolic move against the powers that are crushing us all beneath their boots. When push comes to shove and it takes and the time comes to bring that idealism to the material world, it will fail. Continuing on this neoliberal, passive-resistance path we are on is doing nothing substantial. In fact, I would at this point argue that it is much better to do nothing with your time rather than reach out in these pacifistic forms of “protest”. Why waste energy and time and resources trying to expound upon the consequences, when the rulers in charge of the decisions causing these consequences simply do not care? It would be a more productive defiance to enjoy what freedoms you have left to the fullest. But this is not a call to inaction.
Let’s take for example the most pressing humanitarian crisis of our time in America. Children and infants are being detained unlawfully and unethically by immigration enforcement after being traumatically severed from their families. Available for all to hear is a crying and wailing of children ripped away from their parents and place into cages where they’re not even allowed the basic human dignity of holding each other. But nothing changes. The wailing of the children, the wailing of us in response to their pleas for dignity falls on willingly deaf ears. That is right, Willingly Deaf. This crime against humanity is a cash cow for the private companies contracted out to provide services for the slovenly U.S. government. Often times, the cash generated by milking the suffering of our fellow human beings often flows back into the pockets of the politicians who enacted the violent policies.
Really, how could they care? Tucked away in their gilded towers, adorned by shiny baubles and luxurious fabrics and the safety of feeling “too high up to fall”; they are fundamentally isolated and thus unable to actually empathize with the rest of the population. Our collective suffering comes at a massive benefit to them anyways. But they know.
Up in their towers, on the backburner of their mind is the pitchforks and torches of workers past. And all it would take is them pushing us a little too far before the torches come ablaze again. So they patch up the problem and feed us lies to placate us. Credit, loans, bailouts, diversifying board rooms to meet some corporate quota, “community coffee with cops” events. All just putting off the inevitable collapse of their gilded towers, at the hands of the people who have had enough. All just to placate you and make you think “it’s not that bad”, while they continue to drive us all into the ground.
Our protests and marches are expected. The politicians and their ilk gaze upon us, sometimes cheering us on; but always laughing at us behind closed curtains. Laughing because none of this will change. The most they will do in response is drape another rainbow flag in their window, or create a glossy PR campaign about how they are “so sowwy we betwyaed your twusts. We wiw do bettew!” until we fall silent and idle again. And then they continue trying to satiate their unquenchable thirst for more wealth, they will bleed us even drier. Then again, we will take to the streets doing our same little song and dance until we get our cake again. And then the cycle will repeat until eventually, the cake won’t be enough.
But when will the cake be enough? When was the cake no longer enough for German citizens in the ‘40s? It seemed like it was always enough, even as greasy smoke wafted into their homes. Stop taking the goddamn cake. Especially, stop dancing for it.
But as I said earlier, this is not a call to inaction. It is quite the opposite. Do something they don’t expect, an action that actually begins to crack the fragile foundations they have built their towers on. Tear down the walls they built to keep us quarreling with each other, and not uniting against them; reclaim the Earth so walls like that will never take hold.
It is time for the people of America to refuse the cake, and take the bread. The state is constantly inflicting violence en masse, and history tells that this is not a problem we can ignore until it goes away. Like any festering wound; what is occurring in ICE “detention facilities” will only get worse unless it is forcefully stopped. ICE agents, their bosses, their boss’s bosses, and all the way up that chain; does not care. Make them care. If they separate families, why do they deserve to go home to their families? If they are the cause of people not feeling safe in their own neighborhoods, why do they deserve to feel safe in their neighborhoods? Maybe they would not laugh at the terror they are inflicting on humans if they knew what it felt like.
If those people doing the grunt work of the inhumane incarceration of children did not have some fake authority bestowed upon them by a violent mob of capitalists; it would be fair game to light the torches and grab the pitchforks. Why does some stranger in a faraway place (no ties to the community they affect) get to bestow authority to our most psychopathic neighbors maim, imprison, torture, and kill the rest of us? ICE’s authority really is meaningless, and easily defeated; as long as we do not keep seeking the same, comfortable tactics.
Get tight, get organized. And support #OccupyICE
