Or worse, what if the investigation is inconclusive?

No good will come of this.

But their victims also love to glory in their victimhood, and do precious little to culturally police and self-criticize their own ranks. Sure, there are deep-seated historical, political, and economic roots to all this, its not carried in the DNA as our conservative friends would have us believe. But the fact is that culturally crippled communities, whether they be black, hispanic, Amerind, or Russian have got to step up and accept some of the responsibility themselves. Those ethnic categories aren’t the only ones that are slumping into violence, crime drugs and antisocial behavior and family dysfunction. When rural whites do it we call them white trash or rednecks. And that’s where we recruit a lot of our cops, too.

African-Americans, Mexican and Central Americans, post-Marielito Cubans, Newyoricans, and small-town anglo meth heads are going the same way as the reservation Indians. (The upper middle class refugees from San Juan, Bogota and Caracas fit right in, though. They can buy their way into the American Dream, and never seem to have any trouble getting green cards.) With the destruction of the culture soon follows the collapse of the community. The social causes may be undeniable, but they mean little to the victims who are expected to use their taxes to fund the social institutions that will stop and reverse the decay.

The Jews have always understood this, which explains their liberal bent and progressive politics. They have been the victims of oppression for so long that they can see why these communities are crumbling before their eyes. They empathize. Their culture has had the time and exposure to develop antibodies to this kind of oppression.

I am fortunate enough to come from a similar community, skilled working class urban and 19th century European anarchists. But that’s not what I see coming out of Cuba these days and flooding into the slums of Hialeah, Calle Ocho, and Souwe’ Miami. I am not a racist, but I am definitely a cultural chauvinist. And some cultures are definitely no damn good. Maybe they got a lot of help getting that way, but they still are corrupt and decadent.

The fact that the forces of reaction and the fascist elements of society exploit this dynamic to advance their own domestic agenda is undoubtedly true, but that doesn’t help that poor Paki who gets shoved around in his store by some hip-hop punk employing his sociological interpretation of American society to justify his own brutality and racism.

Yours was a singular rant, and that’s its fatal flaw. If I didn’t already have the context, I’d get the impression that the riots just happened, and that the execution of a young black man by a white man, cop or not, had never happened before.

Fact is, it isn’t about Michael Brown in particular, the cop who shot him multiple times, the town of Ferguson, or any particular or extraordinary thing. Fact is, the riots were inevitable, in Ferguson or somewhere else.

There’s a whole flock of chickens coming home to roost. There’s the execution of young black men with dreary regularity. There’s a reactionary white population terrorized by Osama bin Laden and Fox “News”, afraid and murderously angry. There’s our militarized police forces, a problem I started noticing back in the ’90s that I called “municipal armies”. There’s inequality of wealth, leading to ever more defensiveness among the elites, and deployment of the “police” to protect their power and position. When the entire town of Ferguson turned out to oppose them, just who–or what–were the Ferguson “police” protecting? Just themselves and a tiny white minority desperately clinging to power.

Have you had much contact with the police in the last decade or so? I walk several miles every day in a semi-urban area, so I have plenty of chances to observe these modern cops. More and more are clearly former soldiers, uniformly six and a half feet tall, Aryan and burly, favoring black paramilitary costuming instead of traditional police blues. The way they carry themselves, even the way they deploy themselves on the sidewalk to force pedestrians to run a gantlet, tells you unequivocally that these guys are mentally still part of an occupying army in Iraq or Afghanistan. They came home and picked right up where they left off.

We’ll see more riots, more shootings, more violent police overreaction…I can’t say “before it’s over”, because I’m not that optimistic that the problem can be fixed. But maybe history is a guide, and with enough rioting and civil unrest, things may change for the better. They did, for a while, after the ’60s. Maybe, if we’re lucky, history will repeat itself.

And it’s indicative of long-term, pent-up frustrations. This was just the straw which broke the camel’s back. I think these people have suffered under the police for quite a while, with no appropriate responses to their complaints.