Jorge Gonzalez, suffered a broken neck, and a compressed spine at the
hands of 3 sheriff deputies in Texas. He couldn’t even hold his head up
for this mugshot…so they had to hold it up for him. They actually thought the mugshot was more important than a hospital visit.
After a deputy tripped him he hit his face hard and went unconscious. They tased him couple of times “to wake him up”.
He was left paralyzed neck down, went through a series of surgeries,
and was in ICU on the ventilator for over a month after the arrest.
According to the hospital he went over 26 hours in Hidalgo County jail
without necessary medical attention that could have saved his life.
Six years ago today, in Ferguson, Missouri, Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager—just one of hundreds of instances every year in which a white police officer kills a young Black man in the United States. This time, though the cup overflowed—and for a week and a half, an ungovernable revolt raged in on the streets of Ferguson as angry residents and their supporters used a variety of tactics including arson, property destruction, looting, and gunfire to keep police at a distance and impose consequences for the murder. This set a precedent for subsequent rebellions around the country from Berkeley to Baltimore—culminating, after a pause during the first years of the Trump era, with the countrywide upheaval in response to the murder of George Floyd. To understand the events of the past two and a half months better, we can revisit the uprising in Ferguson and the practices and discourses that emerged in those days.
The left needs to be engaged in building unions, tenants’ councils, and other mass organizations, and fighting for reforms within the current system. The process of struggle is itself educational: collectively confronting oppressive institutions sharpens our understanding of the world and exposes the limitations of reform. Once a movement wins a reform, the inadequacy of that reform soon becomes apparent. That’s the way many people radicalize. The presence of an organized, visible left that is promoting radical analysis can help, by offering people tools for the fight. Meanwhile, the infusion of new voices can enrich the left’s own analysis, vision, and strategy.
The left should also pursue what Robin Hahnel calls “experiments in equitable cooperation”: alternative institutions like worker-owned cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and restorative justice programs. The dominant institutions won’t allow these to get very big, but they still serve an educational purpose in that they demonstrate that humans can organize themselves based on values other than greed, individualism, and vengeance. Practically speaking, they prepare us for the tasks of running a future society (skills which are especially vital in moments of acute crisis like a pandemic in which the state has all but abdicated its responsibility for the general welfare).
When Sherry Johnson was eleven, she found one day that she’s gonna marry a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her. She became pregnant and in order to avoid investigation and criminal case, her family and church officials decided to make the girl a legal wife of this monster.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
However, her case is one of thousand cases of child marriage. According to statistics, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.
Johnson and her family also attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. One girl said when she was 10 she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and later gave birth to a daughter. There were all documents confirming her and her child’s age, but still, the judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, telling her,
“What we want is for you to get married.”
And nevertheless, America prefers to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, like in Syria, calling it “defending freedom” rather than to change states’ laws and to protect American children from rape, coercion and molestation.
Today, Johnson is campaigning for a state law to stop underage marriage that has already become a norm in some states.
Please, help me to raise awareness to this issue. No one can remain indifferent to the problem of child molestation.
#StopChildMarriage
#StopChildAbuse
Chris Christie refused to outlaw child marriage in New Jersey when he was governor. Until a few months ago 13 year olds could legally marry here. Fuck Republicans.
Just remember until women got the vote age of consent was like 8 years old. It was one of the first things women changed when they got the legal right to vote and represent themselves as human beings.
