Being Seen And Heard

by C. A. Matthews

“The people are not to be heard…”

You could have heard the gasps from miles away.

“The people are not to be heard at council meetings,” the chairwoman of Toledo’s City Council announced after anti-Flock camera activists clapped for a few brief moments following another council member’s brief statement. He’d actually had the audacity of wanting to hear more about what was actually being done with the data the Flock cameras were collecting before renewing the contract. (The vote on the contract is scheduled for later this week.)

Obviously, Toledo City Council doesn’t need to listen to its citizens—citizens who voted each of these city council members into office. We’re allowed to show up at the council’s meetings and listen quietly, but our wishes are not to be made known.

“The people are not to be heard…”

We are to be treated as children—seen but not heard.

If you’ve ever been in a similar situation where someone in authority told you to shut up and stay in your place, I’m sure you would have gasped at that ill-considered statement, too. Residents concerned about ICE obtaining data from the city’s Flock cameras and using it to harass and wrongfully deport others of color are to be scolded, told to sit quietly in their seats like the naughty little kids they are.

Even with all the pleas of politicians encouraging citizens to register and vote that we’ve witnessed lately, there still seems to be an underlying message of, “Vote, but then go home and leave it to us. We know best.”

“The people are not to be heard…”

At least once a year I feel obligated to remind readers that voting cannot save us from the abuses of authority we suffer daily at the hands of the politician-puppets of the oligarchy. It was never meant to, particularly not in the US. Voting is a method of pacification used by the powers-that-be to placate the masses into thinking they live in a “democracy” so they don’t get any ideas above their station in life.

You know the kind of ideas I’m talking about if you’ve read this blog regularly. Ideas like:

“All humans are created equal and deserve to live in peace.”

And dangerous ideas like...

 

To read more dangerous ideas and find out how voters can actually make themselves heard, please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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Happy Birthday Vichy USA!

 

If everybody had a notion ’cross the USA

That everybody’s gone fascist—like Donnie Trump, oh yay!

 You’d see them wearing blond hairdos

Doing their sieg heils too

Everybody’s gone fascist! Vichy USA!

(Sung to the tune of Surfin' USA. The rest of the lyrics can be found at the Substack link below.)

 

by C. A. Matthews

The 1976 Bicentennial was really something. I remember fondly all the fabulous fireworks displays, huge parades, and special band concerts in the park. It was nice to think about how the United States had stayed together and made it a full two hundred years. As a child, I didn’t really understand what all had happened in those two centuries and how the US had played a major role in maintaining violence and oppression both at home and around the world, activities that would lead to the current fiasco Americans find themselves in fifty years later.

I would have never thought that the “land of the free” meant that we’d come to deny immigrants asylum based on their race, religion, or ethnicity. I probably would have laughed at the mere idea that well-to-do white South Africans would be considered deserving refugees, but that poor black Haitians who fled a disintegrating country (helped to fall apart by greedy Americans) would not.

I would have never thought that locking up thousands of non-violent immigrants was “freedom”, nor that sending young children out of the country without their parents was a compassionate thing to do. These weren’t the concepts of freedom and morality I was indoctrinated in at church and school.

Fifty years ago, I would have never thought that anti-fascist activists would be labeled “terrorists” and sentenced to harsh sentences by a federal judge for trying to point out the crimes of ICE. These are the sentences of the activists who protested at the ICE facility in Texas: Benjamin Song: 100 years, Marisela Rueda: 70 years, Cameron Arnold: 50 years, Savanna Batten: 50 years, Zachary Evetts: 50 years, Bradford Morris: 50 years, Elizabeth Soto: 50 years. What essentially are life sentences for daring to set off fireworks and wearing all black clothing to a protest, no less.

Meanwhile, the ICE agents who murdered Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter have received a total of 0 years in prison. You read that right—the ICE agents responsible received sentences of zero years for their murders of Renee, Alex, and Keith. The similarities between ICE and the Nazi Gestapo are undeniable...

 

To learn more about Vichy USA (and how to shut it down), please copy or click on the following link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll be able to read the rest of this article, find related links, see more graphics, and leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly email posts, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people!   

This article is the 577th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another eleven years. Thanks! 

Feel free to make a donation at our Paypal or via Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps. Thank you.   

Conscientious  Objectors: Call the G.I. Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487 or the Center for Conscience & War at 1-800-379-2679.