This time it’s different

The mainstream media acts as if each event it’s reporting on is unprecedented, and the #shutitdown protests we’ve seen lately are no exception. Of course, when you have a five-minute memory like the MSM and US public do, I suppose all events are unprecedented – like a goldfish eating itself to death because it keeps forgetting it just stuffed its face. For those of us that are capable of remembering what we had for breakfast, these events are not unprecedented. The US has experienced plenty of large-scale protests over various issues in recent years. Each time, the protesters claim and/or hope they are igniting a revolution. Each time, their cause loses (or never gains) popular support and subsequently dies – just like the Bill of Rights over the past decade. Occupy staged one of the largest and longest lived nationwide protests in my lifetime. In spite of the initial head of steam, they lost the propaganda battle and the media was able to successfully paint them as jobless hippies looking for an excuse to camp in downtown parks. Widespread support was non-existent because peasants on the right were too busy slobbering on the corporate phallus and peasants on the left didn’t want to get onboard with a movement painted as lazy and entitled. There was also those bat-shit crazy Tea Baggers before Occupy. I’m fairly certain that “uprising” and “revolution” were actually part of their motto.

Okay, I was pretty close. Nevertheless, they too faded into obscurity because their cause really only appealed to gun nuts and self-destroying Fox News disciples . Then of course there was the Cliven Bundy ranch standoff. That group wasn’t very different from the Tea Baggers, aside from the fact that they were ballsy (stupid?) enough to actually point guns at the Feds (Good thing they didn’t try to sell untaxed cigarettes though or they might have been killed). They too thought they were starting the revolution, but alas that movement died in its infancy. Apparently it’s hard to get a large number of people in the US onboard with your “right” to use tax payer owned land as a resource for your private business. Most recently we had the Ferguson riots. People of all political stripes declared “this is the one!” But it wasn’t. Again, the divide and conquer propaganda machine that is the MSM successfully turned the Ferguson events into a race issue and whipped up white American, Tea Bagger racism into a fervor against the evil black demons looting and destroying. So black Americans didn’t get their revolution either.

Then the Eric Garner decision was announced and something incredible happened. People from all the above mentioned, formerly bitterly opposed groups… agreed on something. This was truly an unprecidented event. Past events had shown that these groups couldn’t find common ground on wealth disparity, gun rights, taxation issues, or race issues, but they have finally found it on this one issue: everyone is fed up with the police. Black America is tired of being treated as non-humans and slaughtered with impunity, the Tea Baggers fear the militarization of police because it threatens their violent revolution fantasies, Occupy spent years getting abused by the police, and even the average American who is not part of any of these groups is fed up with the police acting above the law and being largely useless when it comes to their primary purpose of serving the public. This time is different. This time a very large portion of the population hailing from diverse political stripes are united under the goal to #shutitdown and put an end to the police state while we still can. People have finally woke up from the divide and conquer in-fighting. The corrupt system has been the common enemy from the get-go, it just took a public declaration of the police’s ability to murder with impunity for people to finally realize it.