Thursday, April 23:
I spent last night in “the bubble,” a holding cell with a phone and 3 other guys. It was hot, smelled of sweaty socks, and there was barely room to walk around the mattresses on the floor. We all got along, the other prisoners watched the 15 letters and 7 postcards delivered, and soon realized I wasn’t the average prisoner.
T, a black man from Queens, NY, told me a store. He was waiting on the corner for his friend to pick him up. He had purchased a special kind of cigarette, that’s hand rolled, and was smoking it.
All of a sudden a van pulls up, men jump out,pull guns on him, and tell him not to move. This is how people are robbed, killed, or worse in NY. In this case it was the “good guys.” They demanded to know if he was smoking a spliff (cannabis), patted him down, illegally searched his pockets without probable cause, and then left when they found nothing.
This is what’s coming to a town near you, if we are unable to show people why government doesn’t work.
NYC is a little ahead, but it’s the logical conclusion of any system that grants a monopoly on the initiation of violence, to themselves.
While in the holding cell I read and shared a letter MLK wrote from a Birmingham jail. He brilliantly points out that governments were meant to keep order to ensure justice. When they go beyond this purpose, they become a “log jam that prevents social progress.”
SamIAm
