The diary entries of a boy I never knew

Talk to me

(Source: honeyithinkyoushouldrun)

A letter to Nicholas LeQuesne Herbet, Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice

You sat on BBC’s Newsnight on December 5^th

And watched as people involved

Recounted their actions on those days.

Mr Herbet, you listened to their words,

You heard them say why it happened,

Exactly why they did what they did,

70% cited inequality,

79% cited unemployment,

85% cited anger at police as a

Key factor in why the violence started,

They told us for the thousandth time

About the persecution they receive from your officers,

Just 7% believed that police do a good job in their area,

They told us about the acts of retribution they committed,

They had finally found a way to hurt those who had hurt them for so long.

And you said,

“These people are criminals,

It’s no wonder they don’t like the police”.

And you ignored question after question

Asking why you think these people

Are committing crimes anyway.

Why do you think they have had trouble with police before

When they live in a nation where they are at war?

Black boys in any part of town are always

A suspect for an uncommitted crime.

How can you ignore them as they cry out

At your injustice, your illegitimate use of power,

And your institutionalised police brutality

Where deaths in police custody are not even investigated.

How are we even supposed to condemn them for their theft,

When white collar criminals are being rewarded

With bailouts and bigger bonuses?

Yes, the content of the riots,

And what happened on those days is criminal.

But the social context that caused them cannot be ignored.

If we do not listen,

If we do not seek to understand,

How are we ever going to learn?

A letter to Prime Minister David William Donald Cameron

Mr Cameron,

In response to the disorder of August 2011

You told the Commons, and I quote:

“This was not political protest, or a riot about politics,

It was common or garden thieving, robbing and looting”.

You attributed what happened on those few days

To a breakdown in the moral compass of youth.

You said those riots were driven by pure criminality.

Now, I have a few questions for you.

Firstly, how could you possibly know this?

How could you know this before speaking to a single person involved?

Whose account of the events did you listen to?

What was your conclusion based on?

What evidence did you analyse?

As your knee jerked so violently

Did you wonder why the violence

That occurred before the looting

Started?

Did you even stop to think that these events

Did not happen in a political vacuum?

Did you stop to think about the role

Of police officers on their streets?

Where do you think all this rage came from?

And did you not think to question the decision on Saturday for

The Met to fall back allowing Tottenham and Hackney and others

To burn uncontrollably in the warmth of August midnight,

For two full days those neighbourhoods burned before order returned,

Spark the fire and watch as they tear down their own communities,

Creating false reason for you to cite pathogen and contagion,

The sickness and the scourge of Broken Britain,

The public will have no choice but to listen.

Where is their moral compass?

What has happened to this country?

When did we become so broken?

When did we start ignoring science,

And reason,

And logic

When did politicians and papers

Learn more about our psychology than scientists?

What happened to your moral compass?

What happened to only reporting the facts,

What happened to listening to those more knowledgeable?

How can you blame their outcries of violence

On criminality and gang culture when

These people, these young boys and girls

Have been calling out to you in peaceful protest

As you robbed them of every opportunity

That lay before them to progress in this life.

You raised fees for higher education

Whilst simultaneously reducing support

For students from poor economic backgrounds.

These riots did not happen in a political vacuum.

Where did this agenda come from?

For how long has this separatist agenda been

Passed down in the white blood of our politicians and media giants?

What happened to:

Of the people,

For the people?

The lifeblood of our democracy,

What happened to the drive for progression?

Don’t tell me you did the right thing.

Don’t tell me if your officers had acted instead fallen back

Neighbourhoods would have still burned for two days,

And those people would have still died.

Don’t tell me you were protecting your country,

Don’t tell me you acted on the basis of intelligence

When there are experts and scientists who have been

Screaming their lungs out to try and grab your attention,

To try to help you see the way forward,

To see the only way you can stop this happening again,

Because it will happen again

Unless you change.

for Ben and Wendell on their wedding day
October 9, 2011

This man you’ve only met tonight,
who is wearing fake glasses and a black tank top
in a dive bar in Manhattan, has made you laugh
eleven times already. He is teaching you
how to download apps on your new iPhone.
He is opening one and using his fingertip
to scribble his name across the screen
so you will remember it,
and you are allowing your body
to become a song that says,
Move closer.

When it first appears,
you don’t know how to name love, so it is
nine fingers deep into the phone
even though I called yesterday,
it is losing your other numbers
until five months pass, and it is just you
and this man laying in your bed on 25th Street.
Your hand slung across his chest, nearly asleep.
There is a James Bond movie finishing on the TV,
and just before your eyes are meant to close,
his body is an electric current in tight underwear
out of bed and dancing, pirouetting
nearly into the television, an interpretive
spy dance that is not stopping, but blossoming
to the music of the credits, and your body is now
in tears from a profound laughter. It is no longer
just a joke, no longer just a beautiful dance.
It is the truth from a body that only occurs
in a bedroom between lovers that says,
When you are happy, I am alive. Without you,
I am not me. It does not matter that it will take weeks
to name the love that sits inside you
stable as a new house.

He is the arms of each man to hold you
and assure you were beautiful.
He is not just dancing
perfectly around your dresser and curtains
in his underwear, he is doing it
for you.

You do not need to know love is a word
which will travel free between you like a flock
of sparrows. That you will deliver yourself to it,
across an Uptown C train, a fire pit in Boston,
the wedding aisle in a library on the west side
of Manhattan. That there are years between this day
and the day you say no other word
can communicate what we both know.
When you say:

Husband—because my life
is my own and I wish to give it to you.
Because I wish to apologize and to forgive,
and to come home to you each night.
Husband, because it was true in a dive bar,
and in a bedroom that we shared, on a street
where I walk around the block
because we’ve just had a fight
and I am coming home to you calm.
I name you my husband to receive you.
True today and tomorrow. My husband
because I have spent my entire life
climbing toward your name.

(Source: wordriot.org)

Sooo I have a 3000 word qualitative data analysis to do this week, and I’ve started writing a poem instead… Woops. Gonna be a long-ass poem too.

I watched BBC’s Newsnight from December 5th again. Got me little angry being reminded of it. So I’m unleashing my anger at the inadequacies of how the police dealt with the August riots in London and across England, and the way in which Cameron, other politicians, and the media tried to explain it away through simple criminality and ‘Broken Britain’, ignoring the larger context of inter-group dynamics and psychology it was embedded in.

Dutch poet Quinsy Gario being aggressively arrested (he was held on the ground and pepper spray was rubbed into his eyes) in Dordrecht for wearing a t-shirt with the words “Zwarte Piet is Racism” in protest of the racist portrayal of ‘Black Pete’, a slave helper of Santa Clause, at the feast of St. Nicholas. The police gave no official reason for his arrest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q-Wf89f0I0M

During the festivities adults dress up as Zwarte Piet and blacken their faces. If children are bad at Christmas they are threatened by Santa and the Zwarte Piet, who pretend to beat them and kick them.

The following articles explains in more detail:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/holidays/2011/12/zwarte_piet_holland_s_favorite_racist_christmas_tradition_.html

http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1202-DEC_SEDARIS