The Broom of the System or Acceptable Range of Collateral Damage---francisco diamond, los angeles

The Broom of the System or Acceptable Range of Collateral Damage

Subtext (episodic protest anger)

But a week after the protests, I needed cash to pay rent and my bank was closed and boarded because of the looting. So because I don’t drive, I had to walk further and consequently fell. Eyes needing delayed glasses due to COVID. The blind leading myself. 

I got some ice because it was really bad and sat on a curb to ice it ( no place to sit in a restaurant due to COVID). A bum comes and I tell him to go away. Because of his newly awoken politicalness, he grabs at my hat and then just looms behind me while I am trying to nurse my knee. I get up and he follows in a weak preying on the weak way. And only after I threaten to throw a public scooter on him, does he leave. 

Next day: leg swelling and now I will need to buy ice every day for two weeks but have only a tiny fridge with no freezer and little money. Also no ice chest, I just threw it out during Covid cleaning.

The only place to buy ice is from small store that sells small expensive  bags and no ice chests. All the drug stores within a five block radius are closed due to looting and same with supermarkets. (My personal radius after all and after fall is a block). 

Six days later, the drug store opens and there is rejoicing.  Still, there is a problem getting drugs — Vicodin, crack you can get anywhere here. 

Vicodin is one of the only things that the pharmacy won’t send to you for free during COVID.  The pharmacy that I normally go to was looted so badly that a security guy told me from between board cracks: it will never reopen. 

So, I have to find someone to go to a pharmacy that is not here in ground zero. Ten days later a friend that had gone to the wrong place two different times- delivers. (Drug addled themselves because they were nervous from protests, so CC had self- medicated with pot)

Subtext ( Episodic Anger) part two

During the protest, there was a night when ten cops stood on my corner waiting for a radio call to march and bushwhack the protestors. 

There is a young black unhoused with only one leg that I have seen sleeping in the gutter, must be mentally ill? During the day, he rents a scooter to ride around on standing up on only one leg. Must be atheletic?

The night this goes down he’s wearing a pink sweater. He is zipping around waiting cops like a gnat and I am filming it and they are waving him a way- like a pink gnat. 

The cops get their marching orders, rush down to the other street corner and looking like the broom of the system that they are: sweep up all the people along that block: arresting them. Onelegged pink sweater man among them. Mind you this is a local character not part of protest. This is collateral damage. Is it acceptable damage if a young black male goes to jail and because he is black and more sensitive to COVID ditto square the fact that he is going to be around prisoners with COVID?

The marchers are marching for black lives because they matter?

I mean the national dialogue among white flighters is that marchers will spread disease bla bla they don’t care about old people bla bla...this is not that. 

What it is: witnessing stuff in my neighborhood at ground zero is not the same as national dialogue. This place the place they march is full of the poorest black people and the most violent.  At the end of the day, marchers go home to safe places look at the little burn marks on their fingers as an honor scar from holding the match of their activeness too long and I will sit here in their . 

I think a lot in parallel images now. 

What if the Vietnam 🇻🇳 War protestors all magically could have stepped through a portal or had free tickets  and could have marched in Vietnam about the Vietnam war.

It would have politically activated the Vietnam Cong 

and they would have said see even Americans know that they shouldn’t be here.

And then they would have killed Americans with more gusto and righteousness.

While the protestors wept gently because one of their goals had been to save more American lives.