14

The other night I was stopped on my bike by a Riverside cop. This same night, Chris Dorner killed one officer and dramatically wounded another on Magnolia. The two incidents were about an hour apart. After I was stopped the cop searched my bag and let me be on my merry way becoming another chapter in our endless catch-and-release police program. This kind of thing has happened to me so many times I can’t even remember how many individual instances like this have taken place. The truth is I don’t care to think about it, in the same way that the cop, Officer Spillman, kept questioning me about all my DUI experiences that I didn’t care to talk about. Just repeatedly interrogating me at random, or for his part; “stopping a cyclist for riding on the curb” and this, apparently was cause for reminding me of all my short-comings as a civilian. Luckily I didn’t have any of the drugs or the usual paraphernalia that I carry around with me everywhere, and so it made the illegal search of my person and my belongings short and shitty, but not as shitty as it could have been.        

A deep part of me feels that Dorner is a harbinger of what is to come. I admire his ability to reap vengeance on the corrupt abuses of power that California and America has suffered through overbearing law enforcement. But it’s nothing new. They spend our tax money like the kind of people that can squander another’s money. (Buying Segway personal transporters; what the fuck?) I can’t stand it, in fact I hate it.

It is a symptom of a larger problem people bureaucratically absorb themselves into our government, like lobbyists, law enforcement, politicians, and military contractors and then they feign that everything they do is out of some sort of necessity. As if cops need assault rifles on a suburban beat, but the firearms manufacturers lobby for guns as if they were school lunches and eventually all police everywhere own their brand of ‘standard issue’ firearm. The politicians; paid for by one source or another enter into a race for profit from mega-conglomerate corporations, that are then backed, promoted, and in turn back and supply our government, typically in the form of military. (but there are others) Along with this comes the illusion that everything becomes necessary when it is paid for by an indirect supplier: everything is made necessary as long as the bill gets passed on to the people. This is just a microcosm of why and how our government doesn’t work. There are other things. It is not lost on me and its not lost on the American people. When Spray paint costs an astronomical 10$ a can and the buffing of graffiti costs $100 a linear foot, it’s just a bunch of bullshit and everyone knows it. Chris Dorner was burned alive in a cabin that was set on fire by police officers who were trying to undermine his rampage killing streak that stemmed from the corruption of law enforcement.  Laws are abstract. The laws need to change. Each passing day we move closer and closer to a police state, the America that was is becoming more and more like the ”reds” that they feared so much so many years ago.

In Riverside, if you drive down Arlington avenue, every signal has a camera or a transistor or is in fact a flashing, ticketing camera signal it is lined with signs that post your speed and flash lights if you exceed various speeds and this is all very interesting because the street itself runs through the most suburbanized part of Riverside. There are nothing but concrete walls on either side for miles. Behind the concrete walls there are tract homes with little or no land, and a few sparse designed little parks that close at eight, wherein, after eight the police will stop you and search you. They go to bed promptly and get up around the same time so they can all sit together in traffic on the way to, wherever. They come home together in traffic and start the cycle over and over again. On the weekends they drink and mow their small lawns (if migrant workers didn’t already get to it during the week) and this is a ‘respectable life.’  

This is unfortunately, reality. This is what the future is becoming. Boxes to live in that they pay for. Cars to get us to work that they must insure, fuel, maintain, register, and license all at personal expense. And then they do it to themselves, “no respectable lawyer could be taken seriously driving a scion.” The sect of humanity that I seem to be a part of is certainly a blind one. California has been bought over so many times, that it is becoming a stockyard for immigration and labor. Each successive generation is rolled-up into the fabric of this place, and if they resist their fate is sealed: Poverty for the artists. Incarceration for the dissenters. A respectable monotonous life for the skilled and unskilled alike.  And it’s all cheap and pointless. What options do they have? They are controlled by the constructs that have positioned them in this way.