Emptying The Ocean With A Paper Cup: That's The Job

“The problems may have been there, but they were new to me. A lot of this just destroyed me. We want our people back. We want everybody to come back and be a part of it. We would like to change. We want to improve, to be able to help what other people feel is the problem, because we didn’t see it.”

- Mike Brandon, 45, a Ferguson contractor whose suffered as protests stretched on over the months

"In the city of 21,000, there are literally 16,000 with outstanding warrants out for their arrests. That means that three out of every four Ferguson residents is a wanted fugitive. There’s something very wrong with that,..."

All supported by American law, and it's judicial system, we might add: every bit of it perfectly legal, as the plunder of blacks has always been in this "land of the free."

Knowing our fellow citizens will kill us, before securing our rights, is a discomforting feeling. That they think their murderous framing is good, and normal, is unnerving. That they'd rather fight over it, merely because they can, says all any black history student needs to know about the "content" of white America's "character" - a much discussed topic - after 400 years. Their willing betrayal is true, and still as based in their own ignorance as ever, reason be damned. No one can reason with the violently insane:

What’s hard is reforming the whole country, the whole culture, the whole world. What’s hard is looking at the systems that cause racism in your own workplace, your own community, in yourself. Because that’s a fight that doesn’t end with a “return to normalcy,” which usually just means people learning not to let their racism get caught on video. That’s a fight that requires we acknowledge that none of us in our lifetimes have ever seen “normal,” that we shouldn’t settle for a version of “normal” that’s anything less than “the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children.” 

I worry that the ebb and flow of social change isn’t determined by the resistance of the reactionaries–that revolution doesn’t slow, stall or even reverse because the Right finds new reservoirs of strength. It happens because the revolutionaries get fatigued. We want to declare an easy victory, get some racists fired and go home. Progressives had a huge rowdy party the night we fired the GOP from the White House in 2008 and then, seemingly, spent the next four years in bed. 

What’s happening in Ferguson is great. It’s not over. The outcry on college campuses against SAE because of the Oklahoma University video is great. It’s not over. 

Getting racists fired is always satisfying. It’s never enough.

So you yell loud, you yell often, and you never change focus:

Reparations now. Reparations tomorrow. Reparations forever,...