Tick Tock Sheptock

The fact of the matter is that, if we can't have conversation about contentious but important issues, then we can't come to agreement on those issues and they'll always be contentious. So I'll touch on a few of those issues here with a focus on police shootings of unarmed Black men. I hope this blog post gets people talking more productively about these issues and brings us closer to resolving them. I hope that our governments will begin to proactively reverse the damage done to poor people in general and to Blacks in particular or that poor people will start a revolution which ends with them taking more than they would have gotten through civil reparation “RAP-arations”. Simply put, anyone who tells those who are reacting to the violent police shootings and deadly beatings of unarmed people that they should remain calm and just vent on social media is not only out of touch with reality but also grossly illogical. When the police who have sworn to “serve and pro...

As I watch events in Ferguson, MO play out in the media, I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., during an interview with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” in which he said, “A riot is the language of the unheard. The U.S. Government has failed to hear that the economic plight of the American Negro has worsened over the past few years”. It's crystal clear to the socially and politically conscious that governments in the U.S. are defending the interests of corporations, not defending or enriching the lives of all American citizens. On the contrary, poor people who want a better life often become capitalist cannon fodder. (Just think for a moment about the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling.) Once a group is socioeconomically deprived, American governments add insult to injury and compound their suffering. They treat poor people as if their poverty is the result of a character flaw, as opposed to a set of systemic flaws in American governance. They aim to pu...