so watching the black power mixtape, and angela davis in particular, convinces me that one shouldn't necessary call a group that advocates violence violent, but rather call it self defense. this'd be giving those groups the respect they deserve, constituted as they are, or have been, by people who suffer a lot of violence from the police.

but this still doesn't clarify for me whether self defense, or however you market it, is actually useful to a cause. it seems too easy to villify and make monstrous anybody who fights against the police; we live in a civilized country where law enforcement has a monopoly on violence, and there are probably some good reasons for that. it's just real fucking scary to me and most people that i know. i am a privileged white kid and i've never been a victim of police violence so perhaps i'm not the one to say. but i am the one to say in the sense that i'm a citizen and i choose whether or not to associate myself with political movements and if one is getting violent that gets me down and makes me want to stay away. and it'd suck to lose a super sympathetic guy like me. am i wrong though? i mean, i've always thought that violence was just fundamentally a deal breaker, that as soon as it came out that the protesters were not avowedly peaceful, were in fact avowedly packing, did in fact KILL SOMEBODY, made people bleed, the whole population that'd never been exposed to police violence would abandon that movement.

is that a socialized thing? could that be changed? is the blood of a police officer this magical substance i've felt it is? i mean, it is pretty important in that that signifies revolution and not reform. (does it? i guess not if you understand it as self defense) perhaps if there was more publicity of police brutality protester violence could be more sympathetic, nothing's set in stone. one'd just have to contextualize it better. reinforce, time and time again, that they were attacked. this would still preclude protesters readying themselves to fight, that'd undermine the whole peaceful thing. if people show up with weapons, even if they insist so sweetly that they're only in case the police turn out to be brutes, that pretty severely undermines that argument. so violence but only if they hadn't started protesting with visible weapons in any way? hidden weapons? no. so just ad hoc weapons, which is to say they'd have no chance, which is to say one shouldn't try to protest violently, to fight back. i'd love to be told i'm wrong, or at least i'd be curious to hear that. maybe k would tell me differently. ha! what a funny thing that is to say at the end of this, by appending her to this i implicate her as its inverse; a glimmer of a mention paints her as definitively as could be. one who might disagree