Christmas In America 2021

Valentina Orellana-Peralta was trying on dresses for her quinceañera when the LAPD shot and killed her.

Oh, they weren’t trying to kill her, she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when some asshole started causing trouble in a Burlington Coat Store.

Somebody else called the police and either said the suspect had a weapon (which he did, a large bicycle lock and chain which can cause serious injury, even death) or specifically said he had a gun (which is a helluva lot more deadly), reports are unclear.

In either case, the police showed up, spotted the suspect near an injured victim, and shot him.

Either that bullet or another bullet fired by the police penetrated a drywall behind the suspect and struck Valentina Orellana-Peralta.  Her mother was in the dressing room with her and saw it happen.

There are three primary gun safety rules:

1. Treat every gun at all times as a loaded gun.

2. Never point your gun at something you don’t want to kill.

3. Know what’s behind your target before firing.

Now, there are cases where split second decisions need to be made; an active shooter still blasting away as police arrive, f’r instance.

But in all other cases, police need to make sure there is a genuine and immediate threat to civilians before opening fire.

“Hold on!” some cops will say.  “That means we have to wait until a suspect shoots at us before firing at them!”

Yes.

THAT’S.
YOUR.
FUCKING.
JOB.

That preening “thin blue line” bullshit doesn’t mean jack if you’re using it as an excuse to treat the very citizens you’re sworn to protect as collateral damage in your effort to protect yourself.

As the old cartoon character Super-Chicken would say:  

“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

(And being a cop is not even among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America -- you wanna risk your life on a daily basis, be a roofer -- and the majority of officers who die in the line of duty either keel over from heart attacks or perish in car accidents, not gun fights with desperate criminals, although this year more died from COVID-19 than any other cause.)

Since the 1960s American police have become more and more militarized, not just with military surplus weapons and equipment, but with an attitude more suitable for an occupying army than a public service.

Joseph Wambaugh pointed this out with the title of his first novel in 1971:  The New Centurions.

You’re not Roman legionaries -- although too damn many of you openly admit they want to be Nazis.

You are supposed to protect and serve.

You did neither with Valentina Orellana-Peralta.

Don’t stop reading!
We’re not done!

What happened to Valentina Orellana-Peralta is tragic and needs to be hammered home but her case is not unique nor are the police the worst offenders.

The United States military, fighting in our names, purportedly to protect American interests, has needlessly killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the Middle East as the result of purportedly “surgical air strikes” involving smart bombs / cruise missiles / drones.

Every person killed -- every child with their brains blown out, every grandmother mangled so badly they can only be identified by their clothing -- leaves behind dozens of survivors who will remember.

Oh?  What?  You thought they’d just shrug it off?  You thought they just wouldn’t care what happened to their sons and daughters and wives and husbands and brothers and sisters, that they’d either shrug philosophically and say “shit happens” or else excuse the United States for wreaking havoc from above because hey, America needs to protect itself by blowing up foreign communities?

Fuck you.

Every survivor will bear a grudge.

More than a few of those grudges will turn into action.

The most hot headed with strike back with violence, seeking an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

The clever ones will find ways of perpetrating misery and trouble for us that can’t be traced back to any one source, that won’t be expressed in violence and bloodshed but rather in a loss of influence…

…and that will result in far greater bloodshed.

You think Osama bin Ladin and the boys down at Al-Q’aeda just woke up one morning saying, “Whaddya feel like doing?”  “I dunno, whaddya you feel like doing?”  “I dunno, maybe we could go crash some airplanes into American skyscrapers or something…”?

We tend to be squeamish about the cost of war.

Back in the days between the two World Wars, many members of the U.S. Army Air Corps thought they could sanitize warfare and lessen the carnage by developing precision bombing skills, dropping the proverbial “bomb in a pickle barrel from 50,000 feet” with newer and better weapons.

Their argument being that surgical strikes could cripple an enemy’s infrastructure and ability to wage war, forcing them to the negotiating table.

It didn’t work in World War Two, and the so-called bomber mafia were replaced by a far more brutally pragmatic breed of leadership who saw the way to win wars was by burning cities to the ground.

Dresden.

Hiroshima.

Nagasaki.

The pragmatists’ argument being the only way to end a conflict was by making it so damn intense the enemy had no choice but to surrender or die.

They could claim their approach worked in World War Two, but only a generation later the Vietnamese showed that strategy to be not only completely useless but actually counter productive when fighting an asymmetrical war.

The bomber mafia returned with a vengeance after that, convincing U.S. political leadership that high altitude drone attacks not only spared American lives but could kill terrorists and enemy combatants precisely enough as to not cause any civilian casualties…well…not too many civilian casualties.

We see now that was a lie.

War is a damn bloody business.

The innocent will always suffer.

The way to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians is to find out what the damn problems are and fix them.

Not try to batter them into submission through brutality.

Certainly not to profit off that battering.

Valentina Orellana-Peralta and tens of thousands of Middle Easterners all died from an American cultural bias of shoot-first-and-who-the-hell-cares?

We claim high ethical principles and grand moral values, but the cold hard brutal truth is that from day one we were willing to inflict unjust harm on the innocent so long as we got what we wanted.

In fact, we weren’t so much willing to inflict harm -- because that implies some level of consciousness and self-awareness about what it is we’re doing and why -- but obliviousness to the suffering we imposed on literally millions of other people.

Who fucking cares if Fatima is ripped to shreds by shrapnel from a bomb aimed at her neighbor across the street on the supposition he just might be a terrorist?

Who fucking cares if Valentina is cut down by a bullet on what should be a happy, life-affirming occasion so long as we kill another bad guy?

Who fucking cares if some local mom & pop store goes out of business, wiping out that mom & pop’s savings and hopes for the future so long as we get to buy cheap plastic crap even cheaper from a big box store run by billionaires?

Don’t assume death is any less painful or agonizing just because it takes a long time.

The police in Los Angeles were more concerned with stopping a bad guy than with making sure no one else got hurt.

The military in the Middle East were more concerned with keeping U.S. casualty rates down than in effectively eliminating the root causes of terrorism.

We’re more concerned with saving a nickel than seeing our neighbors have enough.

It has got to stop, people.

Or else it will stop people.

Merry Christmas.

© Buzz Dixon