Milwaukee vs. the Secret Police Who Are Trying To Make It Worse

I’m sitting here in the only air-conditioned room in our Milwaukee apartment, trying to keep track of the newest batshit thing that’s happened in America over the past week.

And it’s easy to see without looking too hard that things have gotten even crazier.

Why?

Fear and anger got Donald Trump elected president of America.

And President Trump knows this. Despite his relentless touting of his passing that cognitive test with the elephant picture, the man isn’t dumb.

He has continued to use fear and anger over and over during his presidency to rile up people on every ideological side.

And now he’s really done it.

“It” being how he, the democratically-elected president of America, used an Executive Order to mobilize and send a hodgepodge collection of federal officers to dramatically stir up trouble in American cities which have Democratic leadership and which were not in a state of anarchy.

So he had to bring in some anarchy.

As a result, the question is are Americans going to react peacefully, maintaining the predominately peaceful Black Lives Matter marches, or are we going to react with violence?

Because this mobile secret police force is apparently traveling to other Democratically-run cities, like my own city, Milwaukee.

And I honestly don’t know if other cities like my own will react peacefully to such a violent provocation.

Because people are not in a good place due to a lot of factors, systemic, Covid-related and otherwise.

And, sadly, it’s a lot like in NFL football games when a player does something underhanded and illegal and then another player reacts to what the first player did but the referee only saw the reaction and not the original underhanded act.

So the player who reacted gets the penalty.

Applying the metaphor, if protestors react violently to the violence being rained down on them by federal and local officers, the people at home will believe that the protestors are the violent ones.

And they’ll feel such unconstitutional action was necessary and thereby legitimize the further dismantling of our flawed, work-in-progress democracy.

And that’s definitely not fair.

But neither is much of anything.

Welcome to life. If there was a city limits sign to the town of Life it would be:

So… if Americans react with violence, then we are playing into the fear-mongerers’ hands.

At the same time, all of this craziness is, politically, a good sign.

Sending a secret police force in is a last resort attempt to win back political support because President Trump’s popularity has been fading.

Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter protests have been chugging along rather peacefully in the last few months and they continue to make positive change.

For example, the Washington Redskins finally got rid of their insanely racist logo and team name. And, recently, they rolled out what name and logo will replace it:

Yeah. 😂

They haven’t chosen a new logo or name because the owner really didn’t want to change the name in the first place but that just goes to show that the ongoing cultural pressure to be better is working.

And that’s why President Trump with his dismal poll numbers decided to throw a violent and unconstitutional wrench into everything.

Specifically, he is using his power to punish citizens in states run by people in the other political party.

We sound more like Putin’s Russia every single day but we don’t have a beloved motherland like the Russian people because we stole ours from the Native Americans not that long ago.

In an earlier time, like, four years ago, violently punishing people in another political party would be known as an “abuse of power”.

Technically, according to the Constitution, it still is an abuse of power but it’s also now known as “(shrug) how it is”.

Since Congress and the Senate agreed to not care about lawless behavior performed by the president, many people seem to just be holding on for the November election.

That is… if we’re all not dead from coronavirus and if the current president doesn’t impede or cancel elections.

Of course, if President Trump does cancel the November elections… well, if there was a board game called “Political Systems,” he would have moved his piece inside the “Authoritarian” area.

So … the American president is presently using all the chaos happening right now, like… the three simultaneous hurricanes/tropical storms which were threatening land in the south recently

and, oh, let’s not forgot about the Saharan Dust which is extra-extra this year

and the ongoing ever-trending-the-wrong-way coronavirus which is wreaking havoc on America because of really poor leadership and how Americans have politicized public safety:

President Trump is trying to use all the present chaos (some which he is largely responsible for) to his advantage so he mobilized a hodgepodge collection of federal officers to start trouble and they began in Portland.

And, again, this federal police force is only going to American cities which elected political leaders from the opposing party of the American president.

So there is blatant partisanship at the heart of this tyrannical crazy.

This is going to be a great Netflix documentary, if we’re not all too dead to enjoy it.

Or too poor to be able to afford any TV service because we lost our jobs due a pandemic that the American federal administration has politicized and otherwise not dealt with.

Sigh.

In any case, the “Portland Attacked by Secret Police” story got a bit more interesting because, well, it’s Portland and it has done a largely great job at not reacting with violence.

As a result, Portland gives the rest of us a map of how to not take the bait and react violently.

After the secret police crashed in on the city, a naked Portland protestor completely shut down the secret police who had been plucking protestors off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans, with her nakedness.

And the police did not pluck her in any way.

Oh hell no. While nakedness has long been used as a form of protest by various people in positions of arguable power throughout history, here in America our culture wants to appear impossibly puritan while simultaneously objectifying sex, secretly indulging in horrifying porn and creating a monstrous market for sex trafficking and a nearly state-sanctioned culture of rape, abuse, sex crimes and the like.

And so to see a woman voluntarily strip naked and do ballet poses in front of the police…

they honestly didn’t know what to do.

In other countries, naked protestors are arrested.

In America, we’re such a mess that a bunch of those police probably hated themselves for their bad thoughts and therefore couldn’t function.

They just ran away.

I mean, the implications are kind of astounding and disturbing.

In any case, Portland wasn’t playing into President Trump’s desperate hands.

For example, a bunch of Portland moms came out to peacefully protest and also protect the other predominately peaceful protestors because that’s what good moms do.

They linked arms and sang lullabyes about how they’re peaceful and should not be shot.

And the secret police then tear-gassed the moms.

So then some Portland dads came out because they hadn’t been paying attention because major league baseball has officially started up again and they were super distracted but then they were all “Oh shit oh shit oh shit” and so they also mobilized.

And apparently some dads came with leaf blowers just so everyone knew they were really dads who wouldn’t have even been out there but hey now things just seemed to be getting a little out of control.

And then, according to Oregon Live, the dads armed with leaf-blowers were also taken down.

One leaf-blower-carrying dad who had just come out for the first time because he supported black lives mattering and was also not cool with all the stories of violence being rained down on peaceful protestors was charged, hit and then arrested.

In Alex Hardgrave’s Oregonian article, he reports an exchange between this leaf-blowing Portland dad and a Portland mom who also happened to be at the police station because she also got arrested:

“As (Portland Dad) waited to go into the holding area, he said he saw (Portland Mom)… and they spoke for a moment. (Portland Dad) said he complimented (Portland Mom) on her rainbow skirt. As he was processed by officers, he said he didn’t have time to understand what had just happened and what was going on at each particular moment.”

I mean, this is serious business. But, at the same time, those two sentences above made those two people sound so much like a mom and dad.

I feel it’s more of a choice, but I know my dad claimed to not understand what was happening and going on at various moments a lot.

Definitely a dad thing.

And, also, how dude-like to BRING UP how he did something he felt was “good”.

Dudes: “I did that. Praise me.”

But these people sound an awful lot like white people because they largely are a bunch of white moms and dads.

And that’s great. A bunch of other white people to crowd out all the stories about Karens and Chads.

And they lift my white girl spirit because I like to think that these fellow middle-aged white people represent a progressive shift in culture.

And, consequently, as in an authoritarian government which officially represents the status quo, they’re regarded as “anarchists” and “trouble makers”.

And know who aren’t known fans of anarchy or people not obeying law and order?

United States military veterans.

Right. So then this Portland Navy veteran got internet famous because he also wanted to check out these protests because he wanted to see if there really was a secret police force because, you know, it’s America and we don’t have those here.

Or at least that’s always been part of the dogma.

Therefore, the Navy vet was apparently asking federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths, or, as he defined it, “swearing loyalty to the Constitution” and, in response, the secret police freaked out on him and broke his fingers.

Really, the feds blatantly look more like anarchists than anyone else. And, accordingly, they definitely don’t seem to care about the Constitution.

And that’s probably why a bunch of United States military veterans then mobilized to serve as a wall for the protestors and to protest the unconstitutional mobilizing of a violent collection of federal officers.

The American military veterans came out to defend something they all fought to defend: democracy and all the stuff that comes along with it, including the right to peacefully assemble, the right to protest (free speech) and a citizen’s right to due process when being arrested after committing a crime.

Of course, many who were kidnapped off the streets of Portland or arrested were not aware of any crime they had committed.

Maybe that’s why they weren’t given their phone call or told why they were arrested.

Because a group of lawless authoritarian federal officers just kidnapped them illegally.

And organizations like the ACLU have reacted with legal action.

Because this is not business as usual.

But it hasn’t been business as usual.

Yet, as long as more Americans come out to stand with the Americans who are behaving like Americans, we may come out of this with our flawed democratic country intact.

And, best case scenario, maybe even better.

Because right now it seems like children are running our government, our football teams and our federal secret police force.

And that’s an insult to children who would probably do a much better job in any of these positions.

And Portland gave us an example of how to react and not play into the hands of corrupt, anarchic fear-mongerers.

Maybe we don’t have to get naked and get our parents involved but we can’t meet violence with violence.

In Milwaukee, maybe we can meet the secret police with our professional sports athletes and beer because sports and drinking is largely what we have here.

And, after all, Wisconsin’s motto is “Forward” so, with that in mind, we can move forward with professional athletes at our side, love in our hearts and alcohol in hand.

Not the likeliest of combinations, mostly because of “love” being included in there,

but these are not the likeliest of times.