Last night for THREE hours, at least three helicopters circled the Oakland (CA) area. They started again today at 5:45 am. It’s a racket you cannot ignore and certainly not one you sleep through. They appear to be both police and media choppers.
Following the Trayvon Martin verdict, Oaklanders roused for a spate of pissed-off protests. You’ve gotta love the idea of obstructing a FREEWAY, especially in CA where folks are so enamored of their cars. Rather than show up on the streets, the keepers of public safety and information felt it their duty to consume mass quantities of fuel to circle at a safe distance above the frays.
This is the same arms-length strategy that allows, for example, fighter pilots to bomb the crap out of civilians in war zones. Impersonal target selection enables a soothing lack of lack of understanding or connection with the targeted.
Perhaps Oakland is asserting itself as a war zone. Certainly it’s an economic one.Our media, marching lock-step in their devotion to “covering” anything that blows up, burns or bleeds, remain mired in their long-programmed propaganda that “racial injustice” is at the heart of everything that involves people of color.
Too many people here do not have the resources they need to live a decent life. The other issue being that a “decent life” is generally defined by the corporate puppet masters as including whatever you don’t own.
On balance, we Americans, even the poorest of us, are a whole lot more privileged that vast swaths of humanity around the planet. How do we gain perspective on what exactly we ought to be fighting for and how we need to do it?
Susan Burgess-Lent 