Atlanta: Will BLM “cancel” MADD?

By Rubashov

Last weekend, there was another tragic interaction in Atlanta between a citizen and men-with-guns sent to enforce the edicts of politicians.  A citizen was stopped, under suspicion for drunk driving.  There was a struggle and he was shot by a police officer.
 
That citizen happened to be dark-skinned.  The police officers light-skinned.  The political lobby group Black Lives Matter seized upon these surface details for the furtherance of its agenda.  Of course they would, BLM is a “racialist” organization as defined by the philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois.  A “racialist” organization in a deeply “racialist” country.  A nation so obsessed with race that it can’t see past it, to the reality within.
 
The police are an instrument of government.  They do not make up their own laws.  They are instructed by the politicians who make up a government.  Any honest Marxist would recognize the Establishment’s use of the working class (the class from which the police are drawn) to enforce their will upon the working class. 
 
Of course, BLM is not honest, they have corporate funding.  Their response to the pandemic bailouts – the largest transfer of wealth to corporate elites since the post-2008 bailouts – is to target the jobs of working class people.  “Defund the working class”! 
 
How many of those corporations who just added billions to their coffers are glad that the protests are aimed at working class police officers rather than the corporate elite?  No wonder they are happily handing BLM money!  “Defund the working class”! 
 
On its webpage, Black Lives Matter is clear in its support for the corporate transfer of jobs from Americans of all skin-colors to low wage workers and modern day slavery.  BLM is generously supported by Nike, a corporation whose profits are built on wage slavery and vile labor practices.  Just ask Michael Moore.  He wrote a book, Downsize This!, and produced a documentary, The Big One, detailing this greed.
 
But all this is beside the point, which is that the interaction ending with the death of a fellow citizen in Atlanta was ordained by white-collar politicians, not blue-collar police officers.  The police were following the explicit legislation enacted by politicians. 
 
What happened last weekend might not have turned out the way it did under the drunk driving laws of the 1970s.  Back then, police officers routinely allowed those suspected of drunk driving to get back into their cars, provided they promised to go straight home.
 
But then there was a national outcry over the deaths – especially of young people – due to drunk driving.  A group of moms got together and formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving or MADD.  They pushed for tougher drunk driving laws – and demanded that the police take drunk driving seriously.  In 1984, Senator Frank Lautenberg wrote the National Minimum Drinking Age Act that set the national drinking age at 21 and MADD successfully lobbied President Reagan to sign it into law. 
 
MADD descended on Congress and legislatures across America and laws were passed that made drunk driving a serious criminal offense.  The definition of “drunk-driving” was changed so that more and more drivers would be classified as “legally drunk”.  In 2000, Senator Lautenberg’s legislation set 0.08 as the blood alcohol level threshold for drunk driving and President Clinton signed it into law.  It made .08 the rule everywhere in the United States – criminalizing the behavior of many and vastly increasing the interactions between police and citizens.
 
The political leadership of both parties instructed police to “get tough” and crack down on drunk drivers, give them no slack, no second chances.  The police obeyed the political leadership and enforced the new laws enacted.  Drunk driving deaths were cut in half. 
 
In trying to address the tragedy of deaths due to drunk driving, the political leadership of both parties required the police to forcefully interact with more and more people under the influence.  This has led to charges of over-policing or, in some instances, police brutality.
 
The police don’t make the law.  Congress and the Legislature does – and often, after there has been an outcry from a great many ordinary people demanding action – as was the case with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. 
 
Those seeking to “defund the police” should take a moment to think about the long term ramifications of what they are setting into motion.  And especially those white-collar politicians – members of the corporate elite like Senator Mitt Romney and Governor Phil Murphy – who supported “tough on drunk driving” laws only to run to the front of the protest when they have unfortunate consequences.  They need to stop and think about the amount of funding police departments have received to get tough on drunk driving.
 

Are politicians like Mitt Romney and Phil Murphy for drunk-driving?  Do they want to go back to double the more than 10,000 deaths that still occur each year due to drunk driving?
 
We have to turn down the emotion in order to have a rational discussion because yes, lives are at stake, but in more ways than many people realize.
 
Drunk driving laws have mandated more interactions between police officers and citizens to the point where many New Jersey towns now expect an income from such enforcement and many politically-connected lawyers make lucrative incomes from these police interactions.  Many citizens – of all skin-colors and ethnicities – have been chafed at being stopped and asked questions at drunk driving checkpoints and such.  Each of these stops carries with it the potential for an outcome like that suffered by our fellow citizen in Atlanta.  But the police don’t do it because they want to… they are TOLD to do it by politicians like Mitt Romney and Phil Murphy.
 
America has a long and complicated history where alcohol is concerned.  You might call it a love-hate-love-hate relationship.  If the Governor is interested in diving into it, we could suggest, as a starting point, two books with very different perspectives. 
 
The first is the pro-temperance Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, by T.S. Arthur (1854).  This was the “bible” of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union – a kind of Black Lives Matter – that grew out of the protests against saloons and liquor stores during the winter of 1873–1874.  The other is the nostalgic The Old-Time Saloon, by George Ade (1931) , written at a time when most thought prohibition would be the law forever (the election of FDR in 1932 changed that).   A decade ago, PBS produced a wonderful documentary on this subject titled, Prohibition.  Written and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, it is somewhat a commitment, but well worth the time.
 
Once things are a bit back to normal, we might suggest the establishment of a book club in Trenton.  There is a fine independent bookstore there, run by a very pleasant gentleman of the Left and his extended family.  But until then… until people can meet and talk on-the-level, every person in a position of power should think deeply about what really brought on the death of a fellow citizen in Atlanta and many other fellow citizens (of all skin-colors and ethnicities).  Then think about what is being proposed and what will inevitably come from it. 
 

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

(George Orwell, aka Eric Blair)

Quoted by Chris Hedges, in his bestseller, “Death of the Liberal Class" (2010).