Word/ Wake Up!

- A Private College Student's Take on what Ails Us as a People

The oppression of the police can be easily summed up in the following way: the police do not follow the laws more often than the rest of the population- on the contrary, less so.

The idea of having a sector of society, who have both more effective means and looser codes of conduct than other sectors' with regard to the treatment of other human beings, not only tolerated but venerated sickens me. I know that many find it unappealing to talk about things on an abstract level, but listen a moment.

It is supposed to be the case that the police and the people had an equal degree of secrecy: both try to keep as much from each other as possible. Civilians working with the police is a direct influx of capital into politics. Here, this is one of the spigots of water filling the tub faster than it can drain, and here we are, drowning.

Isn't it weird how much the police oversee? Can you imagine the villagers of Washington's time standing for a foreign owned security force? The subjugation of land inevitably leads to the expansion of the perceived "domestic" and the perceived "foreign," as more territory is subsumed, but ever more is discovered and the subjugation process repeats itself. Simultaneously the system gets more complex on the inside, so that more power can be contained in a smaller geographic space (I'm talking about industrialization, the formation of concentration camps, or cities, for people to dedicate their work to the state in).

Regardless, in strict social terms, the people we know are not the only important people in our lives, or even the most important. If Uncle Sam drafts me into the Vietnam war, maybe I die at nineteen. Where is my mother when I am on the field of battle? My father is there.

The entirety of the United States government has ZERO seats in congress or the senate. Political parties violate the spirit of our government because they create a bureaucratic hierarchy of political discourse. The faults of this nation were not all created when the Constitution was written; it was a progressive document when it was written, and we should not forget or scorn our history as progressives. What I mean to do is point out that our country does not have to be the way it is, based on our constitution. Think about all the other laws that were written after that, all the drug bannings, antisuffrage and pro-slave moments

(pro-slave? Are you fucking kidding me? Try talking about how you're uncomfortable with your body in 1857 when it turns out the government literally wants to enslave people and doesn't even try to hide it. Cheese and Crackers! Are you also having trouble imagining how hard it must have been to live in those times? Let's cut the founding fathers some slack. Think of progressiveness over time as a kind of inflation: no matter how progressive you are (how cheep coke used to be), after a certain amount of time you become an asshole (it takes more dough to get some! It's great that you have nickels from 1957, but this Coke's from 2010). We're all going to be assholes in the future, let's be honest. Unless we create a different environment now! Don't let people create scapegoats in the ghosts of our past. We are people, one.),

that were ratified by the politicians and their children to whom we gave (or: who took) the power of government when this country was formed, and are not inherent to the document itself. Then again, if you want to see it was the document that only represented a generally brutal and bloodthirsty folks, which I can also get behind. I guess it just comes down to how you judge statements like this:

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. "

Do you think Jefferson is more implying:

1) that democracy is a foolhardy idea, and that he thinks tyrannical impositions must be made on such a system, or

2) does he think that the idea of democracy is just the best idea we've had so far?

This is what it means to be radical. To know that none of us has succeeded yet, because as long as some are under domination, all are under domination. This is intrinsically true of all social activity. If you're visiting a couple and the wife is bossing the husband around and not letting him get any words in (or vice-verse), and you don't say or do anything, you are also being dominated. Since it's established that the "kingdom of god" has not been established, nowhere, and that no idea has "changed the world" in and of its own accord, and that there is no "ideology" as such, until we learn to trust our own judgment in terms of what we personally believe, and not based on the best available group or club, we, friends, will not be human agents. People in the future are going to be blaming us for all the shit that's happening now. Doesn't that seem unfair, since the government is so fucked up now? Well here's the news: it's always been fucked up. All proletarians have always denied agency when it comes to their collective history! And we follow in those footsteps. This is the sense in which the founding fathers are our ancestors. They mixed shit up. Were they corrupt? Sure, but so are we. There is nothing special about the present.

So stop living that way!

Adam Wadley