Casually Callous

Did you know that in Cincinnati, Ohio, police can use their tasers on anyone from the ages of 7 to 70? That’s right, steal some food from the local Kroger and get tasered, even if you’re 8 years old. It’s policy. Somewhere in our so-called system of justice, we have a policy that says it’s fine to electrocute children for stealing food.
Don’t believe me?
Cincinnati Officer Tasers 11 Year Old Girl For Theft
Where are we going? Where in the great fuck of all things are we going in this country? This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last time it has happened.
Sure, people are upset about it now, but how long until the officer is exonerated? Oh, he’ll be put on administrative leave, and things will die down, and he will resume his job. It happened to the officer who shot Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy who was accused of threatening police with a gun (it was a toy).
To be clear, that officer *was* fired, but not for his actions involving the murder of 12 year old Tamir Rice, but because he had omitted information from his employment record when he applied for a position on the police force.
I use these examples because we most often talk about the children in our society. “Save the children!”, “protect the children!”, “think of the children!” but when it comes to our actual practices, children in this country go without food, without shelter, without medicines, and without protections when they are gunned down or electrocuted by those who are supposed to protect them.
It doesn’t stop there, though. Look at our culture, which demands a constant consumption of products day in and day out in order to feed the capitalist machine. In order to do this, corporations pay the lowest possible wages to buy in bulk, and the manufacturing is done by men, women and children who are forced to work in sweatshop conditions, near slave labor, just to satisfy the bottom lines of companies that then mark up those items at a percentage increase of hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands.
11 Facts About Sweatshops
Child Labor in Sweatshops
Made In American Sweatshops
There’s so much more than this, but I want this to be a starter for you to begin searching for yourself.
Then there’s one of the more egregious examples of our cruelty, and it is quite recent:
Immigrant Children Held In Cages
Certainly in many of these cases, there are people paying attention and trying to make changes, but what do you do when people think you deserve to be harmed?
Corrupt Prosecutors
What’s Being Done About Prosecutors Who Abuse Power?
The Untouchables – America’s Misbehaving Prosecutors
I would also like you to watch this most recent edition of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” While he certainly makes jokes at times, the research done by him and his team is exemplary:

Everyone should have the full measure of their rights, and for our system to undercut that in order to meet quotas, and to give bonuses for finding people guilty *even if they’re not*, that is insanely corrupt!
I could go into what we’ve discussed before, about 1 in 5 people in the United States going hungry, or the hundreds of thousands of homeless at any given moment in one of the wealthiest countries on earth (that’s the U.S.), how LGBT communities are being terrorized by hate groups being given carte blanche to engage in acts that are beyond reprehensible.
We could also discuss the discrimination against immigrants, legal and “illegal,” the push to profile Muslims and prevent them from entering the United States. We could discuss our nation’s fetish with guns and how the yearly murders of dozens of children in schools isn’t enough for us to stop being insane about keeping them, or perhaps we could go into great detail about how our police force sees us more as potential enemy combatants rather than citizens in need of protection.
The list goes on and on and on, and all the while the giant orange blowhard at the top still demands that we “make America great again,” because he’s nothing but a fool who continues to speak without thinking, to act without feeling. He’s a sociopathic narcissist at best, and a malevolent, unstable psychopath at worst. Regardless, our nation is in peril, and I honestly do not know what we can do about it, because it looks like half of the country is okay with this:
Trump Supporters Dig In Deeper
Why Trump May Be Hard To Beat in 2020
Trump Supporters Say Trump Delivering On Agenda
It goes deeper than a “GOP vs Democrats,” “Trump vs. whomever” level, but it cannot be denied that our country is picking up speed on its descent into madness. I do not know what lies in our future, only that I worry for every human life around the world, because whatever happens, EVERYONE will be affected, for better or worse.
For years, we’ve sown the seeds for this culture of callous behavior, firmly fertilized immediately after 9/11, and now we’re reaping the harvest.