I didn't really elaborate on this on my first post, but you reminded me of something that just gets under my skin, Lisa. Personally as someone who lived near Detroit for many years is just how little foresight a lot of these #BLM activists have. Of COURSE crime is going to go up now that you're threatening violence against people who's supposed to stop this this. By advocating for the police to become nonexistent, you advocate for no protection from your crap whatsoever.
This is what Detroit's problem has been for literally decades, and it's also why Detroit is one of the most dangerous places to live in the nation. At this point we don't have the money to support the city, which is why the police are so scant – but regardless of the reasons, a state without police is a scary place to live.
A lot of more liberal people seem to ignore this warning, because it's literally the tipping point that brought Detroit down to its knees and destroyed it from its core. It's slowly getting a little better but I don't go to anywhere in Detroit that isn't downtown and that's because of how rough it's become. People don't realize that these same kinds of riots and black-versus-white mentality is what destroyed, at the time, the 11th most populated city in the US. People don't understand the insanely destructive and counterproductive power of anger, at all.
A big problem I see in these communities is an absolute failure to take any responsibility for their problems. I don't know if this is a cultural thing but a lot of people in communities like Detroit will go and point at everything around them – people blame the white man for bringing down Detroit (even though the city has had mainly black counsel and mayors for the majority of its decline) or how some convoluted scheme of how money or finances is trying to take over black people. I know people from Detroit and similar worn down cities in the area who seem to regurgitate this stuff with reckless abandon – not even understanding the history of their very own city. I've even seen videos of sentencing hearings where people who were no doubt guilty of doing horrible things like molesting, raping, torturing and murdering young teenage boys try to garner sympathy by comparing their trials and tribulations to people like Eric Garner.
The Detroit riot of 1967 arguably made race relations in the area worse. Not only did it bring down the infrastructure of the city, leading to its extreme decline, not only did it open the door for literally decades of corruption, it said to white people of the time that black people were not just angry, but extremely dangerous. This is the LAST thing that any activist wants for their group, especially at a time where racism was definitely relevant – which is why I always stand up and promote peaceful protest. It fucking works, it just takes more time. But nobody wanted to listen. I'm seeing the same decline in Ferguson and I hope that Baltimore doesn't follow suit.
When people lecture me about how the "white man" has spoil't their lives, I'm just sitting here, thinking – "Well you're the asshole who shot and killed that man over a pack of cigarettes. You're the asshole who abused their kid so badly that they went on the streets and joined a gang. You're the asshole who went and raped a defenseless woman by the gas station on Southfield Freeway." These are the people who are destroying Detroit, not a group of people who have generally avoided the area for decades. And believe me – it's not just black people, it's EVERYONE in Detroit, but nobody goes and acts like someone who was killed by the cops who went and charged at them or robbed a bank or whatever are fucking innocent.
And I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist, but this complete inability to take even a sliver of responsibility for the wrongdoing of your own people is despicable. Yes, people have died because of the actions of the police, however, that is a problem that resides with the ability for police to do that, not in necessarily racism or whatever. Police brutality is a problem that affects literally every kind of person out there, and there needs to be standards to prevent that from happening. It doesn't matter if someone's intentions are racist or not – if they exercise unreasonable amounts of force, then they are going to be in deep shit trouble. No fucking questions asked. THAT is how it should be. I don't stand by the evil actions committed by white people I know, I don't support them, I don't assume that because they're white they're being persecuted, I expect them to take full responsibility for their wrongdoings and fix their issues.
The attempts to make Mike Brown seem innocent enraged me. He was NOT innocent. Of course his death was not deserved, nobody "deserves" to die, but he was in a situation where he was putting his life at risk. He's not an innocent special snowflake, he was a criminal who was unfortunately killed and thus cannot redeem himself. To me, the true tragedy in cases like his are the fact that he cannot redeem himself, because he's dead. He could have turned himself around, but he's passed. But the thing is, this isn't good enough for #BLM, I have to lie to myself in order for me to be accepted, I have to act like he was innocent, like he never did anything wrong.
Well, don't you think that saying that a person who did something wrong who died, and that's a tragedy because they can't ever make up for what they did… isn't that saying that person's life mattered? It matters enough to me for me to say they deserved a second chance. Is saying that I would do whatever it took to help that man turn his life around and help him if he had survived simply not good enough for you?
I see this a lot with other cases as well. I almost feel as if these people wouldn't care about people's lives like Mike Brown if they had lived – "so what if he goes to jail for the rest of his life, even though he could have learned how to function without committing crime? He wasn't reported in the 5 o'clock news so I don't care", says the typical slacktivist blogger in the back of their head.
What a lot of black people don't seem to realize is that being black is not the end all be all to your life in the United States. Quite honestly most able bodied black people don't have to deal with half of the shit I have to deal with, or people who have physical disabilities, or people who are transgender, or whatever. There's a lot more to this world than just being black, it's easy to paint this world as two sided. #BLM's attempt to exclude not only people who aren't black but people who don't agree with it simply shows the true nature of these supporters – they DON'T care about black lives, or anyone's lives for that matter, they care about their whiny bullshit about how the world is white versus black. They are busy perpetuating the problem because they're mad, instead of trying to look at it from another angle.
But if you keep telling yourself that this is the way the world is, do you think that maybe that's how you're going to see it? If you keep telling yourself the same song and dance instead of trying to actually change that, don't you become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Because I don't see a lot of people outside of these circles who see the world so black and white.
Detroit could be a great city but it's held back by attitudes like that. I think honestly it's starting to die off as people wisen up. I've talked with some locals before and they seem to be encouraged by trying to remove these barriers themselves. But it's not true with all people unfortunately and until these attitudes stop, the problem will continue to perpetuate. It's sad, really. There's a lot of wonderful people down there who's lives are ruined by crap like this.
