Why don't *You* see? (American Revelation, One Shots, Caron Nazario Edition.)

Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed his fateful lightning and His terrible, swift sword.
His Truth is marching on!

~From The Battle Hymn Of The Republic.

Yesterday, there was a video making the rounds of US Army Lieutenant, Caron Nazario, being stopped by police, and then assaulted and pepper sprayed, in the small town of Windsor, Virginia. He was in uniform at the time.

Because the cops knew they'd acted illegally, he was ultimately let go.

These cocksuckers weren't scared, they were high on a power trip and thought they could get away with punching up because the Lieutenant was Black. One of the cops involved in the initial stop was a veteran, and he damned well had to have known as soon as Nazario exited the vehicle that he was looking at an officer. He assaulted the man anyway.

In one of the videos of the incident that I saw, while they were bullshitting around and trying to cover they ass, the cops and EMT's were complaining about Black Lives Matter. This all happened last December. Lt. Nazario has since filed suit in Federal court, on the grounds that his civil rights were violated.

How any of these fucking people still have a job is beyond me. 

I was a United States Air Force Security Policeman, had I done what those cops did I'd have been arrested, charged, gone before Courts Martial and almost certainly been convicted, done time and then been dishonorably discharged at which point I'd have been damned lucky to be able to get a job flipping burgers even in the economic boom of the later Clinton years.

At least, the cop that was a veteran almost certainly knows that. He just thought he could get away with his little power trip and that nobody outside his little punk-ass town would find out about it.

If a Japanese or South Korean cop treated a US Army officer this way, the same people egging on the American cops would be demanding that foreign police officer's head on a stick.

But this bullshit is okay with them, because they're cowardly racist motherfuckers.

This is an old story, and it's honestly not going to stop until people start getting held personally accountable and get their ass throwed in jail for racism, period.

Maybe it's just me, but I wonder if putting some of these motherfuckers up against a wall and having them pose for rifle shots might solve the problem faster. You know, the way they deal with these things in the kind of authoritarian countries that "Conservatives" think they want America to emulate.

'Cause I'll tell you what, if you're a cop in Myanmar (which is a favorite of the Q-nuts lately) and you talk to or point your weapon at a military officer like that, you will lose your life.

But of course in America, murderous authoritarianism is suspiciously selective.

Sure, You can get your town sued, even get sued yourself, lose your job, cause everybody else you work with to get sent for training, be a national embarrassment and this that and the other thing and sure, your name might damned well be mud among all your friends or even to the whole country after that...but unless you do something bad enough to be brought up on charges yourself...if you aren't the type of person who feels embarrassment or shame or if you're some kind of racist ideologue, for you it's probably just an inconvenience.

But this is America, we're supposedly civilized. And yet we permit our Police to do shit that a soldier in a war zone would be prosecuted for, and it's all because of racism.

For all practical purposes, Nazario will probably basically end up owning that town. But the insurance company will pay the judgement, and none of the bad actors involved will care. If they get fired, they can just find another job.

Such should not be the case.

Black people have been contributing to and fighting for this country, often with little or no compensation for their efforts, since before America was America.

We've fought a war over this and the racist side lost. I'm goddamned tired of the fact that we're still arguing about this in the 21st goddamned century.

Literally everybody who took up arms for the Confederacy, or worked for its government, was a fucking traitor. Any and all of them were liable for the death penalty. The United States Government did not at the time have to abide by the rules of war here (and truthfully in a lot of cases it did not) but at the same time history has shown that our country was far too magnanimous to people who manifestly did not deserve it. A hell of a lot of Confederates and their descendants followed the example of Robert E. Lee and submitted to defeat only on the bitterest bare minimum of terms.

And since the 1960's and Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" American conservatism has in fact been effectively Southernized. It's probably one of the darkest ironies of American history that the Party of Lincoln became the party of Southern Segregationists within a matter of a few years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

101 years before that, in the battle of Grimaldi's Landing on James Island, SC (a small action during the wider siege of Charleston, SC) the 54th Massachusetts Infantry first saw action, then fighting in several more engagements against numerically superior Confederate forces on that day, July 16th, 1863. Two days later, the 54th led the storming of Fort Wagner, one of the main gun batteries that defended Charleston Harbor. The 54th successfully seized the outer walls, but during the assault Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the CO, was killed, and the attack was ultimately repulsed with heavy losses. Of the 54th's 600 men, 270 were killed, wounded or captured with a further 52 missing in action and never accounted for. The white brigades on the line suffered similarly heavy losses.

For his courage in bearing the Regiment's colors during the action, Sgt. William Harvey Carney would later be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Oh, and I should add, these men were fighting without pay, out of protest of the fact that they were only paid $10 a month, minus deductions for clothing, room and board, with their final wage amounting to $7 a month. White troops did not have deductions taken out and were paid $13 a month.

The war would  go on for another year before this injustice was corrected by Congress.

And the 54th Massachusetts Infantry would play a pivotal role in several more battles later on in the war. 

What the fuck do people have to do, and how much longer will they have to fight, before we're all treated like human beings and this country lives up to it's stated Constitutional and legal promises of equality?

I spent much of my life as a conservative and a Republican. I was never taught that this type of shit was acceptable. Before I was any of that, I was raised Christian and I was absolutely taught that God created all people equal in His sight. God did not create by degrees. He said that it was good, He saw that it was good, and it was good.

To say that one person is better than another for some innate characteristic is to place your Self and your judgement above God's and according to what I was taught, that only ends one way, you're going to hell.

I've written about my own little bit of experience with my own service's history, about listening to those Tuskegee Airmen, and about the Black folks that I served with personally. I almost certainly wouldn't be here without some of those people.

I work with plenty of Black folks today, hell, my roommate is Black.

Most of those people just want to be let alone, same as the rest of us, to do whatever they do in peace.

If we haven't learned by now that racism serves as a vehicle for authoritarianism and that the fucking people who would abuse somebody like Lieutenant Nazario for no reason dream of having their power expanded so they can abuse and hurt the rest of us too, we aren't going to learn until its too late, and then we'll probably have to have to fight another civil war just to even have a decent shot at eventually getting these fucking people out of power and having a shot at even having freedom.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...

Either we all have that, or none of us do.

Why the fuck is this so hard?

If you wonder why I write about American Revelation and this nation facing God's judgment, well, you have your answer.