‘you got something that’ll look nice on a throw pillow?’

“De­fund­ing the po­lice ab­solute­ly does not mean that we elim­i­nate all cops and just suc­cumb to ‘The Purge.’ In­stead, it’s about mov­ing away from a nar­row con­cep­tion of pub­lic safe­ty that re­lies on polic­ing and pun­ish­ment, and in­vest­ing in a community’s ac­tu­al safe­ty net. Things like sta­ble hous­ing, men­tal health ser­vices and com­mu­ni­ty or­ga­ni­za­tions.”
—John Oliv­er ex­plains ‘de­fund the po­lice’ – and why it doesn’t mean ‘no po­lice’

 

Every­one needs to get off this “they shouldn’t brand it ‘de­fund’ the po­lice” bull­shit.

We called it “glob­al warm­ing” and they didn’t like that so we changed it to “cli­mate change” and they didn’t like that so we changed it to “the glob­al cli­mate cri­sis” and they still won’t take it se­ri­ous­ly.

We re­brand­ed “gay mar­riage” to “same sex civ­il unions” to “mar­riage equal­i­ty” and they still fuck­ing fight it.

The prob­lem isn’t the fuck­ing “brand­ing,” the prob­lem is we have to con­stant­ly fuck­ing pan­der to the low­est com­mon de­nom­i­na­tor be­cause god­for­bid we piss of the mid­dle Amer­i­ca pearl clutch­ers who are go­ing to spend all their en­er­gy fight­ing chal­lenges to the deeply bro­ken sta­tus quo no mat­ter what we pro­pose to ad­dress our stag­ger­ing pile of so­cial is­sues.

👏 It doesn’t mat­ter what we call it, they’re go­ing to fight it any­ways. 👏

De­fund­ing the po­lice is a fuck­ing hel­la­good idea that could rad­i­cal­ly trans­form our com­mu­ni­ties in an in­sane­ly pos­i­tive way and maybe in­stead of us tread­ing wa­ter in some end­less thought ex­er­cise of how can we re­brand shit so it’s more palat­able to the myth­ic mid­dle, we de­mand peo­ple pull their heads out of their ass­es and ed­u­cate them­selves.

Po­lice killed 1,098 peo­ple in 2019.

 

Our tax mon­ey is fund­ing mur­der.

I’m a lit­tle more in­ter­est­ed in stop­ping that than wor­ry­ing about the icky feel­ings the word “de­fund” brings up in some per­son who has ac­cess to all the in­for­ma­tion in the world on what “de­fund the po­lice” means but are too fuck­ing lazy to re­search it and would rather just in­form them­selves on is­sues with their gut re­ac­tions to scary words.

 

—na­tal­ie michelle

Flom­mist Na­tal­ie Michelle does­n’t have a bio. She just rants. Copy­right © 2020 Na­tal­ie Michelle.

PLEASE   SUPPORT   FLOMM
TIPS  +  DONATIONS  DISCREETLY  ACCEPTED

FLOMM
promotes learning  +  education worldwide
drawing attention to works by nü  +  upcoming artists,
designers, writers, musicians  +  MOR

OUR INVOLVEMENT
– however –
is mostly paid for out of pocket or in trade

IF YOU ENJOY
wat  FLOMM  is doing here, please consider


1.   LEAVE US A TIP  :
use our tip jar whenever the mood hits



2.   BUY OUR SWAG  :
our approach is semi-green —
                all our  FLOMMHAUS  merch is made to order



3.   HELP US OUT  :
use our hashtags  #flomm  #flommus  #whereisflomm  #nüflommart  #flommist
when posting on ur socials —
or drop us a note and offer to help in some way
everything we do is on a volunteer basis —
             when we say  YOU CAN BE A FLOMMIST TOO  this is wat we mean

THANK YOU
your support helps our continued efforts
to create content across numerous platforms

clic 「 HIER   」 to return to the DER TUNG front page