I was fortunate this week to attend a couple of performances of the National Poetry Slam in Oakland, where over 400 young people in 72 teams from around the country spilled their guts in highly sensitive, creative, politically-charged, original poetry. No one read their poems; they all recited, with shamelessly strong emotion. To get a sense of what they were doing, check out www.youtube.com/user/ButtonPoetry, where you can subscribe and receive a daily poem video, or click on www.YouthSpeaks.com.
As our own repressed responsibility gnaws at us, it gets harder and harder to do that. So we, like the Aztecs of 1520, push away the guilt more and more often by killing more and more of the Other. We need the Other. Black lives matter. What would America do if it didn’t have them available?
Que bono: follow the money. The simple truth is that, in order to remain “America,” this nation requires a population of suffering – deservedly suffering – Others within the borders just as it needs an identifiably evil population of terrorist Others outside the borders.
Now we can revisit that question of “All lives matter.” In the relentless, cold logic of late capitalism, no lives matter, unless they can be forced into one of the few square holes of the system: consumer, producer, entertainer (which includes almost all politicians), prisoner, enforcer or scapegoat. Life itself is of no value except as a natural resource.