Day of the Dead: Pushing Back Against #BlueLivesMatter on Staten Island

Submitted to It’s Going Down

“I am proposing that…we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.”
–Eve Ensler, “Insecure At Last”

It’s been two years since the world was shocked by the video of Eric Garner’s murder at the hands of the NYPD. With still no justice for his family and his loved ones, Daniel Donovan, the District Attorney whose grand jury did not indict the killer cop, has been promoted by his party to U.S. Representative in exchange for that favor. The cop whose body directly led Mr. Garner to not be able to breathe – Daniel Pantaleo – still has a job, salary, he still has his life.

In the past few months, a group of family members of cops have been cutting up blue plastic tablecloths and garbage bags and tying them to every pole, tree, and street sign in many middle class, white-majority neighborhoods in Staten Island, NYC.

They have even been putting these ribbons outside people’s homes and businesses without their consent or knowledge, and people who take them down have been subjected to verbal, physical, and online harassment. People have received death threats over removing blue plastic from their homes and neighborhoods, which lays bare the fact that law enforcement has evolved into a fascist institution whose intent is to institute unquestioning obedience to the state.

The group putting them up calls them “Blue Ribbons” and they are framing it as a way to show cops they are safe, loved, and respected. Some local politicians, including Daniel Donovan, have even been making them available to people in their offices. This is all despite the fact that this practice is technically illegal in NYC, although the fate that was dealt to Mr. Garner by the NYPD might never be visited upon these bootlickers. Well, never say never.

Are blue ribbons on trees an expression of patriotism or a cutesy endorsement of legalized hate crime? NYPD’s authority is not infallible, one of the many reasons Amerikkka’s “justice” system refuses to react to the misdeeds of its trigger-happy, chokehold-happy sociopathic “boys in blue.” Stop the raids, stop killing black and brown people, stop the deportations, stop terrorizing indigenous people. NYPD claims they’re here to keep us safe – but until we are all seen as humans, they don’t deserve to police in our communities. If you’re a cop, quit your job and become a damn PE instructor. Or better yet, stand up and call out bad cops.

On the one hand, we see these “blue ribbons” for what they are: propaganda that tells people of color they are not welcome in certain (read: white, middle-class) neighborhoods. On the other hand, we see the need for more speech. The “blue ribbons” are meant to falsely imply a safety that simply doesn’t exist for more than half of the world’s population, because the systems we fund for security were not created by them nor for them. In fact, they were created explicitly to exclude or extract wealth from them.

The unnerving truth is that we are so fragile. Any one of us can be done in by a chokehold or a bullet in a dark staircase or polluted water or cancers from exposure to deliberately-released toxins – because our economic system cares only about profits, not about our lives. Only when we sit with the unglamorized notion of our own mortality and the uncertainty of the futures can we truly be free.

While symbols of valor are hoisted for our enforcers of racialized police terror at home, our country is busy exporting training and weapons to state sponsored military and paramilitary assassinating environmentalists in Intibuca, Honduras, murdering school teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, and commiting genocide in Sanaa, Yemen. Local police forces are even now being used as mercenaries of private corporations to brutalize indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, who are fighting to protect their water source from the very same risks white Bismarck residents rejected.

So long as the “blue ribbons” are allowed to remain unaltered in place, white middle-class Amerikkka is allowed to maintain delusions of security, moral righteousness, and consent to a system of racialized coercion and domination.

In the struggle for justice on every level, art & love will be our weapon. From Staten Island! JOIN US!

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