“When everything is said and done there is nothing left to do or say.”
Darryl Dawkins AKA Chocolate Thunder
Riot is a small word. It does little to fully illustrate the rage, the frustration level and desperation needed to fully sustain the carnage witnessed last night in West Baltimore.
Our windows to the world, TV screens, computer monitors and cell phones, provided a real-time view of the lawlessness, up close and personal, as the standoff between law enforcement and angry young people gathered in a premeditated “purge” like event on the day of Freddie Gray’s going home ceremony.
Through their attorney the Gray family angrily denounced the actions of the rioters who hurled bricks and bottles at law enforcement, vandalized parked cars, looted, and set buildings on fire, in a poor black neighborhood on the west side of Baltimore.
There is no excuse for the senseless violence. As the reporters and cameras now wade through the streets of peaceful protesters in the wake of the eruption last night, the focus is on what will happen after dark. The people of the community have joined police in the street to protect their neghborhood from further destruction.
Will there ever be a full examination into the root causes behind the desperation and powerlessness of those who have been marginalized, declared criminal, and worth-less before they have even turned sixteen? Anarchy, chaos and violence has no meaningful place in civilized society.
Legalized violence, perpetrated against a community, any community, needs to be rooted out, eradicated, and those who perpetrate such acts prosecuted, no matter the uniform they wear or the office they hold. Police need to better police themselves and if they cannot some outside force, perhaps at a Federal level must.
The Justice Department investigation into Freddie Gray’s death is just a start.
Law enforcement has a duty to perform. That duty does not include murdering unarmed people taken into custody, left for dead before they have even been charged for a crime.
In order for change to come about, we have to first admit their problem is our problem nationwide.
We need to enact swift change in communities nationwide.
Fast.
What happened in Baltimore, is happening nationwide, to an ever-growing group of disenfranchised, disconnected, young people struggling through generational poverty. No after-school programs. No matter what state these young poor African-Americans were born in they live in a state of hopelessness, lack of opportunity, joblessness. They see the dead ends of the block, the liquor store on one corner, drug store on the other, the parked cars of the pimps and drug dealers, the abandoned homes and factories serve as fire-walls to life outside of the ghetto. College is impossible when you can barely afford the costs of books, breakfast, lunch or dinner while you are in high school.
And then you see the dead pile up, in your own neighborhood, and in neighborhoods like yours across the nation. You see Trayvon Martin. You see Eric Garner. You see Mike Brown. You see Freddie Gray. You see the law as men and women who put you in handcuffs, sit you on the curb, for hours, without charging you, keeping you shackled and humiliated. You cannot experience this without being changed, without being angered.
The problem is when you send out the message that a young African-American life isn’t worth a damn, and you reinforce it day after day, at some point they actually begin to believe it.
So they “purge.”
Senseless violence escalates into carnage, buildings burn, stores are destroyed, livelihoods are ruined.
And now that some people want to talk. Now, in the midst of generational failures and lifetimes of hopelessness, in the wake of the arson and violence, and two hundred arrests, and police injuries, and National Guardsman called in, now after all this, now we want to talk.
Today there were town-hall discussions with young people, free breakfasts, clergy and community leaders gathered across the city to prevent a repeat of last night, tonight.
There is a 10pm curfew. The city is on edge. A nation is focused on a neighborhood in West Baltimore.
And all many of us can do is hope.
As a child I wrote comic books, and stories on looseleaf paper. As an adult I wrote screenplays. I never sat down to write a book. There never seemed to be the right time. Until I began to appreciate the power of now. I went “into the woodshed” as a beloved teacher used to refer to it, sat my ass down and wrote.
lebetenoire 