Sometimes, to let the country heal, you have to kill the infection.
I don’t agree with spasms of mass killing after a big government fight. They did several times after the French Revolution, and it just made things worse. Maybe that was on all the Union leaders’ minds and that’s why they decided to try to integrate all the former confederates back into society with nothing more than a “you be nice now.” But, definitely in retrospect, it was a mistake. It enabled Southern leaders to go right back to terrorizing all the black people who had just been “freed,” back into a state of semi-slavery that persists all the way up until the present day.
Trials would have been nice, I’m not saying French Revolution American Style. They had one for Jefferson Davis, but they got distracted and forgot to punish him and just kind of moved on, and for anyone who’d committed any atrocity in any direction at any scale, they just got to bebop along and back into civil society, as a hero, if they were in the South with all its rebel pride.
Depending on where you’re born today and to who, you might never have a credit card, you might always have trouble renting a non-sketchy apartment, you might have titanic struggles to ever register a car. You might have no prospect of ever getting a job that pays more than $12 an hour. Unless you start breaking the law to make money… and then, boy howdy, God help you, because now you’re a felon, because no one ever taught you how to interact with police once they do inevitably catch you for whatever amateur-hour bullshit you come up with. You’re just a shack and bail-bond person, not a having-a-job-getting-married person.
And no one around you has any hope of ever anything better. Medical care? Police to protect you against someone who’s doing something criminal to you? Education? A way out? Naw, fuck you. The world doesn’t care, you don’t get those things. And, unless you somehow find something to believe in, you don’t care either. You think you’re a piece of shit who deserves all of what’s happening to you, on some kind of deep-down level that’s hard to silence. Even if you for some reason decide to try really hard anyway, manage to get somewhere, one random event can undo it all. Just ask Breonna Taylor.
All of that can be traced in a very direct lineage very directly back to the fact that after the civil war, we decided that it was okay to make a little safe space for racists, even violent and unapologetic ones who would straight-up kill a black person who tried to vote or managed to make a little money, and then formed themselves into a government modeled on the same. The ones of us who do care on some level what happens to all human beings have been handing out half-measures and cookies to people who are starving for justice ever since.
We fought the whole war, and then decided to invite the enemy in to date all our daughters, and then got surprised when they started coming home with black eyes, and we invested in make-up and self-defense classes and moved on. The whole thing stinks.
Sometimes, to let the country heal, you have to kill the infection.
I don’t agree with spasms of mass killing after a big government fight. They did several times after the French Revolution, and it just made things worse. Maybe that was on all the Union leaders’ minds and that’s why they decided to try to integrate all the former confederates back into society with nothing more than a “you be nice now.” But, definitely in retrospect, it was a mistake. It enabled Southern leaders to go right back to terrorizing all the black people who had just been “freed,” back into a state of semi-slavery that persists all the way up until the present day.
Trials would have been nice, I’m not saying French Revolution American Style. They had one for Jefferson Davis, but they got distracted and forgot to punish him and just kind of moved on, and for anyone who’d committed any atrocity in any direction at any scale, they just got to bebop along and back into civil society, as a hero, if they were in the South with all its rebel pride.
Depending on where you’re born today and to who, you might never have a credit card, you might always have trouble renting a non-sketchy apartment, you might have titanic struggles to ever register a car. You might have no prospect of ever getting a job that pays more than $12 an hour. Unless you start breaking the law to make money… and then, boy howdy, God help you, because now you’re a felon, because no one ever taught you how to interact with police once they do inevitably catch you for whatever amateur-hour bullshit you come up with. You’re just a shack and bail-bond person, not a having-a-job-getting-married person.
And no one around you has any hope of ever anything better. Medical care? Police to protect you against someone who’s doing something criminal to you? Education? A way out? Naw, fuck you. The world doesn’t care, you don’t get those things. And, unless you somehow find something to believe in, you don’t care either. You think you’re a piece of shit who deserves all of what’s happening to you, on some kind of deep-down level that’s hard to silence. Even if you for some reason decide to try really hard anyway, manage to get somewhere, one random event can undo it all. Just ask Breonna Taylor.
All of that can be traced in a very direct lineage very directly back to the fact that after the civil war, we decided that it was okay to make a little safe space for racists, even violent and unapologetic ones who would straight-up kill a black person who tried to vote or managed to make a little money, and then formed themselves into a government modeled on the same. The ones of us who do care on some level what happens to all human beings have been handing out half-measures and cookies to people who are starving for justice ever since.
We fought the whole war, and then decided to invite the enemy in to date all our daughters, and then got surprised when they started coming home with black eyes, and we invested in make-up and self-defense classes and moved on. The whole thing stinks.