Shit just got real (AA Group)

[Uponthegears]

Last night I told you about a friend of mine whose tire was shot out as he was driving down the highway through Trumpland (rural Ohio). Last night I thought about him. I thought about why. I thought about what was going to be done. Most of all, I thought about his kid in high school.

I've posted a little about my past and now I think I should fill in the blanks because to know where I am now you have to know where I came from. At 18, I left Sunnyside (Houston) to move to Oakland to join the Panthers. I walked those streets with a cut-down 870 in my hands and not an ounce of fear. There were no Michael Browns lying in our streets and no one was getting their tire shot out. You may say what you wish about us, but those were the facts. After a handful of dumb asses decided they were bigger than us and they'd just take off on their own and attack the cops head on, we pretty much had to split up. Thanks to the two exceptional human beings who were my parents, I ended up in Paris getting a fancy undergraduate education in what was then the most religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse educational environment in the world but also following Eldridge Cleaver. When he left, I became involved in what we call now global social justice and far left politics. After I got my degree, I joined a lay Catholic missionary group called the Maryknolls and moved to Guatemala to spread something many of us know about from our churches here, liberation theology. There, what was a religious belief in the inherent "goodness" of socialism as a tool to restore equality was cooked in a stew of whole families being murdered by US-trained right wingers and I picked up a gun for the second time and moved into the jungle. It wasn't to protest and we did not. We did what was necessary.

I probably should have died there, but then again I probably should have died before my 18th birthday or when I was with the Panthers. In any event, it was the looming death of my father that brought me back to the United States. It was because of his faith and hope, the faith and hope my mom and he shared with people like Dr. King, that I stayed, broke down every gun I owned, gave away every bullet, dressed for the part and went to law school.

Over the last 30, now almost 40, years the arc for me has bent toward justice. I have been fortunate enough to be able to take massive amounts of money out of the hands of the masters and turned it over to their victims. I may have not been able to stop them from lynching us on gurney-trees, but I have made them spend millions on the rope. Despite the undeniably continuing injustice, I have believed in the direction of the arc.

Let me return to yesterday. The ******* cops who "investigated" that attempted murder wanted to know first why my friend was there. They wanted to see all of his rental car documents. They searched his car for a gun. They told him that there was no way these would-be murderers would ever be caught. Last week that pile of human excrement who sits in the White House announced that white right wing terrorism would no longer be a priority of the DHS. The groups to which these shooters undoubtedly belonged were not the "threat" that Obama and his anti-white Justice Department (should I put a "sarcasm" smilie in here, or is it pretty obvious?) claimed. He defended the "right" of Richard Spencer to whip up these racists and that POS Milo to intentionally destroy the lives of undocumented non-citizens, invoking the First Amendment as if it was without limits. Sadly, dozens of DUers joined him. That's fine for them, their privilege makes Spencer's and Milo's dog whistles to violence nothing but "objectionable speech" in the worlds of them and their friends.

They are not "just words" for my friend, for me, for the people who look like me. They are not "just words" when his child is the next black person driving the car down the highway. Trump's free pass for white supremacists is not just a policy we can point to in the next election and say "Vote Democrat." It is a license for them to kill us.

As I said before, I have spent a large part of almost 4 decades litigating the scope of self-defense. From today forward, every time I talk to a group of young people, I will not talk about an arc which now bends toward the chains of slavery. I will not talk about the luxury of claiming that hate speech is "free speech." There are plenty o people out there to do that already. Instead, I will pass along what I know about their God-given and LEGAL right not to have their child end up rolled over in a ditch at the edge of an Ohio road, or, for that matter, laid out lifeless on a Missouri street.

As for me, I will defend myself and the ones I love to the full extent that the law allows.

This shit just got real.