On 9/11, one of my classes that wasn't canceled was Mass Media & Popular Culture. Our usually grumpy & snide professor entered the room and told ppl they didn't need to put their phones away. "Check on your ppl," he said, before beginning a speech that has stayed w me for 17 yrs. He told us what was coming: the hate crimes, the vilification, the war. He told us that ppl were about to lose themselves & their decency in the fury of it all. He said "we are about to lose much more than was lost today, and you all have to be voices of reason. You have to be."

I don't think this piece is getting the freakout it deserves. washingtonpost.com/world/the_amer… Observe the escalations. 1st vilification. Then vilification becomes an interactive function of government. Escalated raids & border militarization. Family separations. The proposed "compromise" of a bigger network of family detention centers. Now, mass revocations of citizenship

My latest: "The lives and deaths of McCain’s victims should not be erased for the sake of sentimentality, nationalism or sanctimony. Not even for a day." huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-… "Any mention of McCain’s political sins has been met with pearl clutching and moralization. “Do we have to discuss this today?” they ask, as though they would be discussing the damage done in Iraq or Afghanistan tomorrow." huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-…

Someone just asked me how I would feel if someone spoke of my dad the way I speak of McCain. If y'all want to get personal, let's go. My dad served in Vietnam. I know enough to know he did some harm. He also tried to do good for the rest of his life, but if when he died last year, if someone he'd harmed over there heard about it somehow, and said "GOOD," I would not begrudge them that. How could I?

I guess part of the reason that liberals are able to fawn over John McCain is that Americans just don't think about the things our military does or has done in recent history anymore. To them, it's non-history. White noise. When I say McCain has helped kill millions, ppl act shocked. That's bc his war mongering is now as invisibilized as the wars themselves. Permanent warfare, permanent atrocity, off in the background somewhere. Nothing that should have any bearing on anyone's character, apparently.

I watched the video. I saw an escalation instigated by police. Ppl are manhandled, abused & killed by cops and then those ppl are scrutinized to meet some fictitious standard of acceptable victimhood. The standard isn't real. Why were their hands on him? Did they treat their suspicion that he was armed the way they would've if he were white?

The prison industrial complex is a system of bondage, torture commodification & death (both literal and civil). You cannot make it good. I am therefore in favor of dismantling it in its totality. It's called abolition. If you need that broken down further: bit.ly/2KuZYiT The prison system is impossible to justify upon any close examination, so people do not examine it. They do not think about it. They simply accept its false inevitability. They have been conditioned to fear one another so much that they believe that millions of ppl deserve hell.

As someone who's been pleading with folks to stop calling 911 over every little thing for years, I just want to make sure we're completely real about something in the current dialogue: Calling the cops over every little thing is a gentrification tactic. Calling the police over every little thing is not about fear or ignorance. It's about control. It's a means of enforcing unofficial segregation and supposedly abolished racial hierarchies.

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