Narratives Vs. Noise: Saving Authenticity
It was 2015, I will never forget. Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood in Fergusson, Missouri. The world beheld its barbarity with a collective gasp. The untimely murder of 18-year old, Michael Brown changed the world. I know it changed my world.
For the first time the world witnessed a criminal act of excessive force, police brutality and murder in cold blood in clear view. The age of information, social media and smart tech showed the world what Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King and others had been saying all along. Police brutality and unchecked crime against Black Americans was systematic and prevalent.
The information age and the technology age has ushered in what many like to call the Age of Acquarious. However, its probably a bit more technical than a moon in Jupiter. It's the fact that there is media: visual, audio and written around the world in seconds that reveals truth in ways we can only accept with contrition or refuse in blind denial.
And the Genocide in Gaza has a similiar effect. At one time, we could debate that the issues were complex and multivaried. Now, we have instant access to history and realtime, ground zero information on the Levant. We can't be fooled, only taken for fools. At least, we cannot be fooled like we used to... We can see with our own eyes and we don't need a broadcaster, network or commercially funded pundit to tell us what we are seeing in a carefully curated photo collage or video edit. We see it all. Right now. Raw. It is why the way the world sees Gaza and all of the actors involved has forever changed.
It is why students, politicians, religious leaders, people of faith, nations and institutions have been pushed to action on the matter. We are awake--we woke now. And the "Woke-haters" who need our ignorance and indifgerence to thrive, are scrambling to block, refute and ban. Our awakened humanity has been pushed by conscience and the stark reality of a Palestine under seige. It is why student protests have errupted in the US, boycotts worldwide, international court cases levied and more. We are living in a moment we cannot unsee or un-know. It is a "Mike Brown moment," when everything you thought you knew is shattered.
No one can ever see Gaza the same again, nor those purpetrating its heinous demise. We are changed. And it is in these visceral moments when everything changes that "peculiar others" have join the collective pain and horror to subvert. In desperate moments they creep in and provoke attacks, instigate violence and run mad in the streets, doning black hoodies, gaithers and backpacks.
Who are they?
Paid protestors. These are not your friends. They take advantage of the horror and the pain of a moment and turn it into something wild and unfocused that the opponents of good can denounce with a modicum of fact. If you don't have your ear to the ground, they look real . . . except they are not. They run across the ground like sparks and fan the wrong flames. And the only way you would know them, is if you were an authentic memeber of a communuty or group they invade.
And this is why we must remember Mike Brown in times like these. In the wake of Browns death, community memebers organized to protest the horror. But as time went on, interlopers appeared. They wanted to "help," they wanted to "organize." And before long the movement was dubbed BLM. BlackLivesMatter was just a rallying cry, and a useful hashtag protesters used for the grassroots. It wasn't an organization with a five-point plan and there was not a collective of founders.
If you were on certain social media during that time, you knew. The original lead protesters were telling the community, "Hey, everyone, we don't know who these people are, but they aren't us." These were not "our" protestors, they were not the people who deeply believed in and experienced the trauma in their communities daily. These were different.
And then, one by one, the original protestors who organized in their communities began to disappear and die. One of the first was Darren Seals a 29-year old community memeber, murdered under mysterious circumstances in 2016. And then more followed, a Missouri man in the Pulitzer-Prize winning photo hurling back a police tear-gas canister in 2017 and a Palestinian American who live-streamed Ferguson demonstrations. In fact a 2019 report from CBS found that 6 men had mysteriously died to date. And there may be more.
But what catches the notice of an investigative journalist, is patterns, ideas, and keywords. There was something about this new BLM movement tbat was oddly familiar. There was usage of similar terms and ideas that had been seen before. Could it be that the "new" BLM movement that supplanted the grassroots out of Ferguson, Missouri was engineered by architects with the same method of operation?
And suddenly, the lightbulb came on. Resist! The word appearing everyehre with similar slogans and logos. The similarities came.from the Occupy Wallstreet movement of 2010-2011. The same ideas, slogans and campaigns emerged in the protests following George Floyd in 2020. And again similarities in 2024 with the Palestine protests. And it is the same chatter: George Floyd protestors recounted people in black hoodies with backpacks, mysterious loads of bricks for chucking, complete with masked taggers spraying "BLM" and BlackLivesMatter on buildings and important structures. Just recently, NBCLA reported that Gaza protestors tagged the iconic Tommy Trojan Mascot Statue at USC. But actual organizers released a statement saying they didn't vandalize the statue. There are eery similarities.
The George Floyd protest garnered over 14,000 arrests, 9 confirmed dead and international notice over the sheer barbarity of the act that took the life of a father and friend. But word on the street, the people that came in to "help," with commentators, cash and campaigns weren't really a part of the movement. It was another co-op. There was even rumor that the BLM "network" that descended on Ferguson and after Floyd as well as Occupy Wallstreet were funded by a Hungarian-American hedge fund manager and Billionaire. Some cite official covert channels of diversion.
And while protest is the right of a people, there is an imparative to understand patterns and shifts that undermine objectives. Currently there has been nearly 300 arrests across America regarding the Gaza protests, FirstPost reports, and that is massive. But progress and lives saved requires vigilance and focus.
Humans protest and demonstrate because the human spirit can bear injustice for onky so long. The need for justice and freedom is as vital as water and air. George Floyd was not the firs to say, "I can't breathe." There was also Eric Garner and the thousands who died unknown, lynched in the night or mobbed in sundown towns in the US. But giving a voice to thw breathless matters wherever they may be.
Humanity cannot live a life that is indifferent to barbarity and injustice. It is in looking the other way that we lose our humanity. That we refuse thw oxygen to those gasping for breath around us.
And we cannot hear their gasping, for the hot air of the subverted narrative. The narrative that is created by unscrupulous others, co-oping demonstrations and concepts. Journalists, doctors, people of faith and regular folks must see through the disengenuous narrative of violence and hate that drowns the voice of those speaking for the ones still gasping for air. Gasping to tell their story. Gasping under rubble and night strikes. Gasping as they leave their homes in the night, fleeing from armed rebels.
Gasping...gasping ... gasping
And on their behalf, don't stop breathing. Because together, in big and small ways we can breath life, to save life. Wherever you are, whatever the cause of humanity: help, heal, breathe. You may be small, but you are not poweless.
Fight On!
CongoIsBleeding
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