The Emperor’s Dirty Drawers

It is clear from Rod Such’s response to Pattrice Jones’s article “Let’s Put On A Show” that for him, a day sashaying down the street with a sign is all the sacrifice he and his cohorts plan to make on behalf of the murdered Iraqis, both civilian and military. For you see, if the war is illegal by definition, which it is, any deaths inflicted that were not in self-defense, are murder. We preemptively attacked them, so they were practicing self-defense while our side was fomenting homicide. This would mean that the murdered American soldiers were murdered not by Iraqis, but by their own United States government, which knowingly sent them on an illegal mission to commit crimes against innocent human beings.

But again, it is enough for Rod Such to walk, chant creatively stinging slogans, and attempt to pressure the known criminals in Washington while headless corpses that moments before were children lay in flesh-pocked streets. Mr. Such accuses Ms. Jones and those who hold her view as “impatient” the very charge that many whites lobbed at black protestors who wanted only freedom and justice during the Civil Rights era. And people like Mr. Such stood by holding placards or watching on television while black children were blown to bits and bitten by dogs. How cavalier people are when other people’s very lives are in the balance. Impatient! How many more murders are too many, how many more of our dollars need to be spent on bullets and bombs before WE actually stop this war crime?

People like me are impatient because this is only a ‘movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq,’ which means it is not that at all. When do we fight the war against African-Americans? When do we fight the war against Native Americans, Mexicans, Muslims, and poor people? When do we recognize that the war needs to be fought against this corrupt system? When do we really bring the war home and bring this corrupt government to its knees by all necessary means and force it to do the bidding of the all of the people? Mr. Such would have us prune the rose bushes along the gas chamber wall, weed the walkway to the crematorium, change seats on the Titanic.

Mr. Such is deluded if he thinks that marching helps; how did 10 million global marchers – pre-war- help when the US dropped bomb after bomb continuing the bloodshed to this day, killing upwards of 10,000 Iraqi people according to some estimates. People leave these marches, as accurately reported by Ms. Jones, feeling like they have done their part; me thinks they doth protest too little. It is all about spectacle, and Mr. Such makes the case at the end of his essay. “Not everyone can afford to go to prison or undergo the expense of fighting the Internal Revenue. Not everyone can miss a day of work or pay fines or serve jail time engaging in civil disobedience.” Mr. Such’ patience won’t allow him to risk jail, but his paltry ‘sacrifice’ facilitates the unconscionable warehousing of people of color; people like Mr. Such cannot risk a day or two of work, thus the massive double and triple unemployment of brown people in his stead. Mr. Such does not have to pay this price because he lives in a system where the losers are a different shade.

Tax evasion or the loss of a workday or two is too great a sacrifice for the cowards who benefit from the white supremacist Amerikkan system that they phony oppose. No, it’s easier to feign dissent, fabricate a ‘wonder bread’ movement with low nutritional value, to present shoddy form as substance. White liberals have been conned or conned themselves into believing that they are doing something, but no intelligent person of color believes for a minute that justice, or change is the object that these marchers are after. If justice were the object, if liberty were the goal, and these people were for real they would be willing to go to any lengths, risk their precious mortgages even, to ensure it for all humanity.