riots – Natalie J. Case

July 4th is a celebration of an act of treason. An act of dissent. The original event, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was only one such act. The colonies had already been at war with their sovereign for some time. They had already convened a Continental Congress once to bring the colonies together and lay down plans for governance and to bring grievances from the colonies to the ear of the king, among other things.

The second congress was convened and from that congress came the Declaration of Independence, essentially a written FU to the king. These Americans were fed up, done with being the king’s dogs. So they rioted.

They started a damn war. They felt cornered, like they had no choice.

Sound familiar?

Sound like anything going on in our country today?

I keep hearing people saying that the Black Lives Matter movement is not going to get the changes they want unless they are “polite” and “protest the right way”…whatever that way is. But that isn’t how the world actually gets changed. We’ve spent two hundred years treating black and brown people far, far worse than old King George treated the colonies.

You think they don’t deserve to rise up and make their own declaration? You think they don’t have reason to destroy the property of the overlords? Is it going to take a war? A revolution?

Think that’s unAmerican? Think that’s treasonous? They aren’t even looking to create their own country, they just want to be treated like people, equal to and considered the same as white folks, by white folks.

That kind of treason is where we come from. An act of treason should not be necessary, a war should not be necessary, for us to recognize the problem inherent in our history and our present so that we can forge a better future.

And those are my thinky thoughts on this July 3rd. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness“

All men are created equal and entitled to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. All men. All.

And on that note, I shall leave you and head out to the living room to start work on Job #2. Have a nice long weekend, Readers. And contemplate the rights which are unalienable.

Any normal June 1st would see me waist deep in preparation for San Francisco’s Pride Festival and Parade, which usually happens near the end of June. I’d be planning training sessions for my volunteer groups and their supervisors. I’d be fielding phone calls from first time volunteers over the phone, holding skype calls to help someone get up to speed. I’d be pouring over spreadsheets, making sure each entry gate had enough people manning the donation buckets.

This year, in a time of a pandemic, we had already canceled the parade and festival before the current escalation of the end of the world, but I can only imagine that if we hadn’t, we’d be seriously considering it now.

Why? Well, because drunk, stupid people are hard enough to contain when they don’t have an instigator driving them to bad behavior. Because we’ve seen so many clashes of community and police (though I have never personally seen police acting inappropriately at the festival itself, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen) and because right now emotions are very high and the world seems to be standing at the tipping edge of something huge.

SF Pride sometimes has 1 million people over the course of the weekend. Those people come in every ethnicity, every nationality, every color, every orientation and every gender. Outside the gates there are protesters trying to tell us our “lifestyle” is wrong, or sometimes other messages that often get lost in the clamor of that many people. There are criminals looking to score drugs or to bloody someone for fun. There have been shootings and stabbings. There have been gay bashings.

Lay that on top of the racial tensions and the fear and the anger, and you’d have a recipe for one giant powder keg, just waiting for a spark to set it alight.

So here I sit at the beginning of Pride month, a little numb and staring into the heart of a country that no longer feels like home, and I hide in my house, watching the chaos around me unfold. My agoraphobia makes it nearly impossible to join a peaceful protest. We will see a spike in virus numbers. This might devolve into a civil war, or at least that’s the way it feels.

Maybe it is the end of the world as we know it. I’m not convinced that is a bad thing. It’s up to us, every individual to decide how we rise from the ashes.

Please stay safe out there, Readers. Support your brothers and sisters as they cry out in rage for change, for equality, for an end to the violence of poverty, discrimination and straight out hate.

None of us are equal until we are all equal.

Tag: riots

an act of treason

it’s the end of the world as we know it