So the most volatile fight ever gotten into on this page was right after the Ferguson riots. My brother literally texted me to congratulate me. What I did that started it was to say that they could not be more counterproductive to the desired results. People were blocked, friends swore up and down that they'd never talk to each other ever again (that lasted two weeks...), and one guy who never responded to another post of mine would literally write response posts an hour or two after every long post I ever did for five years that were obviously meant to respond to me. I have no idea how anyone could live so far inside another person's head, and for years I thought I was imagining it until he wrote something with a description of me and then wrote: "Yes, I'm talking about YOU." Fortunately, he recently blocked me, I don't know how it took so long, but it was a kind of game of passive aggressive chicken in which I didn't want to admit how much it bothered me and he clearly didn't want to admit how much it bothered him.... I was never writing particularly about him, I didn't really think about him much at all, and yet it was so clear he was using me as his straw man of everything wrong with white liberals.
It was almost exactly a year before the Baltimore riots. Baltimore changed thereafter almost overnight, whatever little chance for a renaissance we had was squelched, people stopped moving in and still more people moved out, murder rates went up, economic production slowed down, and speaking of something that should matter to only me, the honeymoon I enjoyed in my first three years back in Baltimore went belly up at roughly the exact same time.
That was 2014-15, we still lived in Obama's America, most of us, hell, even me a little bit, were still in denial at the true extent of the rot. This is 2020, 100,000 people are dead from incompetence, and couple destroyed police stations will barely note a mention in the era's attempted wholesale demolishment of a recognizable United States.
The information is in now. Nobody should give a shit what I think, I only write it down so that my crazy brain remembers what I think if it ever goes south. And whether in 2014 or 2020, any objection to that kind of civil unrest is mitigated by the fact that counterproductive or not, what did you ever think was going to happen when a whole twenty percent of the country gets red-lined out of prosperity, blamed for societal ills that affect them far more than they affect us, get thrown into prison by the million, and are helpless against the proliferation of guns and drugs which are only profited by a couple white gazillionaires?
I still think that these riots are the exact sort of straw man 'American Carnage' Trump has longed to provoke for his whole term, a tailor made excuse for Trump or any other Republican to appeal to the basket of deplorables and make them clamor for the kind of controls on society that triple our hardships, quadruple theirs, and quintuple minorities', but what did we expect? It was the fault of centrist Democrats who consciously made a deal with the devil in the 90s to choose prosperity over long-term security, and broke down the line of defense against the worst of Republican ideology. They lowered the already too low taxes to the point that the already wealthy would easily grow into megamillionaires, they broke down the line between commercial and investment banking so stocks could become easy money for people who could already afford a portfolio, they allowed hundreds of thousands to be thrown jail for decades for the most minor offenses, they prevented the institution of Universal Healthcare, and they refused to cut military spending when the Soviet Union was already gone. If that's what you believe we should have done, I doubt there's any argument I can make to convince you otherwise. But we're now living with the results, and increasingly, we're now dying from the results.
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