This was originally posted as a comment on Oui’s recent post Michael Brown: Is White Justice Trying to Frame a Dead Man? Go there for context if you so desire. I gotta go to work.)
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“Walking in the street”…and the related “walking very slowly across the street against a red light”…are very common acts of small rebellion by minority kids in the U.S. It’s like “Fuck you and your fucking cars!!! We da man!!!” i see it in minority neighborhoods all over NYC and I have seen it in minority suburbs as well. Pushing it further against the direct orders of a policeman…I am not saying that I believe this actually happened because I believe no one in a case that has been this politicized/sensationalized by the media…but continuing this act after a cop says something is risky business. Do this to the wrong cop at the wrong time and anything can go down.
Further…the video? If that really is Brown in it…apparently one of the few demonstrably agreed-upon “facts” in this whole drama…then he was a big, dumb-ass bully at the very least.(http://fox2now.com/2014/08/15/raw-video-surveillance-video-believed-to-show-michael-brown-ro
bbing-convenience-store/>) Notice how every person who moves past him in the store except his buddy gives him the eye and a wide berth. Me too. I read the street well…been successfully doing so in the roughest neighborhoods of NYC since the late ’60s…and I would read him in a NY minute as stupid trouble. Ain’t no “black” or “minority” about it. Same deal in Little Russia, Little Italy or any other neighborhood. Bad news waiting to happen.
Now…the cop shooter? I don’t know anything about him at all. I do know better than to fuck with nervous men who are carrying guns though, and all cops are “nervous” on some level. It’s part of the job.
Just sayin’…spark met powder in this case, and it happened in a powder keg. Now? Now we may be getting our own “Arab Spring,” just as I suggested when the original troubles spread from Cairo. Socio-political ebola, and no vaccine in sight. Read the news. Organized gunshots? “Instigators” from Oakland? The National Guard called out? (That translates as many more nervous fellas…badly trained amateurs with little or no practical street experience…with even bigger guns, by the way.) Uh oh!!! No wonder Preznit O’Bomber left his Martha’s Vineyard vacation hotspot to come to Washington. I anticipate with bated breath a “ready room” photo-op to rival the bin Laden assassination version.
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now.
Of course…Hillary won’t be there. She’s in political quarantine so’s she’ll be able to take over after Obama tanks. Praise God!!!
But seriously, folks…
I am going out into the lovely NYC streets soon. Walking through my local project areas, past my local rough high school as it lets out for lunch, onto the subways, etc. I will be carrying a musical instrument worth thousands; I am demonstrably white, equally demonstrably past my fight-or-flight physical prime and I will probably be alone. Red alert time. Bet on it. Red street alert. This particular societal infection looks ready to jump out of Ferguson and into who knows where. Maybe NYC although I doubt it. More like Newark, Camden NJ or Philadelphia, I think.
At first.
Somewhere.
Watch.
Somewhere chickens be flyin’ home to roost as we speak.
Watch.
Later…
AG