#i wish our government hadn’t murdered so many citizens | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

nancygduarteus · 7 years ago

Text

America’s Unending Tragedy

LITTLETON, Colo.—Evan Todd, then a sophomore at Columbine High School, was in the library on the day 19 years ago when Eric Harris appeared in the doorway, wielding a shotgun. Harris fired in his direction. Debris, shrapnel, and buckshot hit Todd’s lower back; he fell to the ground and ducked behind a copy machine. Harris fired several more shots toward Todd’s head, splintering a desk and driving wood chips into Todd’s left eye.

Todd listened for several more minutes as Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates, taunting them as they screamed. Todd prayed silently: “God, let me live.”

Then Klebold pulled back a chair and found Todd hiding underneath a table.

He put a gun to Todd’s head. "Why shouldn't I kill you?" he asked.

“I've been good to you,” Todd said.

Klebold looked at Harris. “You can kill him if you want,” Klebold told his teenage co-conspirator.

No one knows why—indeed, no one knows the “why” behind such violence—but that’s when Harris and Klebold left the library. Todd got to live.

Thirteen people did not, though. Today, that’s why Todd supports allowing teachers to have guns in schools. Teachers shouldn’t be required to be armed, he says, but if they already have a concealed-weapons permit, and they’re already comfortable using a gun, why not let them have it with them in school, the place they are most of the day, and the place where these attacks happen over and over again?

Today, Todd is a stocky, bearded manager of construction projects, and describes himself as a history buff. He grew up around guns, but after Columbine, he thought hard about whether easy access to them might have been what caused the shooting. No, he decided. “We've always had guns since the beginning of the founding of our country, but what we haven't always had are children murdering children,” he told me over coffee this week. “Something has changed.” Todd believes school shootings are motivated by a fundamental lack of respect for human life.

The way Todd sees it, “liberals like to control others and conservatives like to control themselves.” He glanced around the Starbucks where we were sitting. Statistically, he said, four people there were likely have guns on them. Being near four guns might scare many liberals. Many conservatives, though, would want to be one of the four with a gun.

The gun debate is an odd one because, at some level, everyone agrees on what they want: No more Columbines. No more Parklands. Most people affected by the Columbine massacre can even agree on what definitely didn’t cause it. After the shooting, Columbine developed a reputation as a toxic school where jocks tormented “geeks” like Harris and Klebold. But it’s a stretch to say the shooters were pitiable outcasts, bullied until they snapped. In reality, they were budding little fascists who wore swastikas on their clothes and spewed racial slurs as they gunned down black classmates. Kumbaya circles wouldn’t have fixed that.

The Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colo. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

But, nearly 20 years later, not even people in Littleton can agree whether the best way to prevent another Columbine is more guns or fewer. Todd’s experience—a 15-year-old whose brush with death-by-gun led him to respect guns more—helps to explain why there have been so few new federal gun restrictions since Columbine.

There have been at least 10 mass school shootings in the years since, which have claimed at least 122 lives. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of young people will march on Washington to show just how much this disgusts them. They believe they will be the ones to end the most calcified cultural stalemate of our time: that Americans fundamentally do not agree on whether guns are dangerous—or essential.

Todd worries that if more guns are removed from the hands of law-abiding citizens, a tyrannical government could take over—we could see an American Stalin or Mao. “More people would be murdered without the Second Amendment,” he said.

In the nearby town of Centennial, 64-year-old Carol Schuster said that’s one thing that keeps many conservatives from supporting gun control. “They’re afraid of the government,” she told me. She knows because she used to be one.

Schuster and her husband, Bill, own a company that sells big mobile filing cabinets, the kind that doctors use to store their patient records. Like many small-business owners, they long voted Republican.

The Schusters were terrified when Columbine happened, but they didn’t think it would keep happening. Those shooters were freaks, juvenile delinquents. “Another school shooting” hadn’t yet become a thing Americans say almost every month.

Carol Schuster at her home in Centennial, Colo. on March 20 (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

Then came the Sandy Hook shooting, in which six- and seven-year-olds were mowed down as they cowered in their elementary-school bathroom. Schuster began to feel like her party wasn’t doing enough. (Just this week, Republican state legislators in Colorado rejected a ban on bump stocks, the devices used by the Las Vegas gunman that allowed his rifles to fire faster.) She attended a meeting of Colorado Ceasefire, a local gun-control group, and she was the only Republican there. “Oh,” she thought. “These Democrats really are nice people.” In 2016, Schuster voted for Hillary Clinton as a single-issue voter on guns.

Today, one portion of her office wall is devoted to photos of her family, another to pictures of dogs, and another to the front pages of newspapers covering all the mass shootings that have taken place since Columbine. “Important things,” she explained.

When she saw the Parkland shooting on TV, she decided she would go to Washington on Saturday to take part in the March for Our Lives. Her sign will read, “Former Republican for sensible gun laws.”

Schuster asked me where I was going next, and I told her I’d be interviewing Patrick Neville, a former Columbine student who survived the massacre and is now a Republican State Representative who supports concealed carry among teachers. Schuster said she had a lot of questions for him.

When I arrived at his office in the Capitol building in Denver, Neville looked red and tired. His press secretary seemed weary, too, from listening to dozens of voicemail messages, many of which wished to inform her that her boss was a “fucking asshole.” A bill Neville introduced, scheduled for a hearing just days after the Parkland shooting, called for allowing concealed-carry permit holders to bring their guns inside schools. “Get your head out of your ass!” one woman’s voice screamed on the answering machine. “Protect these children!” (Todd gets angry messages, too—including from people who tell him they wish he died at Columbine. The Schusters, meanwhile, say they get run off the road for their gun-control bumper stickers.)

Neville wasn’t inside Columbine when the shooting happened. He was just outside the building, skipping class to go smoke with friends. When he realized what was happening, he ran to a nearby house and called his mom. “I’m not going to be able to get to my next class,” he told her.

If Republicans are afraid of government overreach, then on the other side, “there’s an irrational fear of guns,” Neville said. Todd and Neville see guns as “tools” that can be safely used for fun or protection. Like Todd, Neville believes shooters target gun-free zones like schools because they know they won’t meet resistance. Not knowing which teacher might be armed is a “huge tactical advantage,” Neville argued. To protect his three young daughters, he plans to send them to a private high school, where teachers can carry guns.

This was the fourth time Neville sponsored the concealed-carry bill, and it failed like it always does, but he plans to introduce it again. Why? “Never a wrong time to do the right thing,” he said. The morning we spoke, another school shooting had taken place in Maryland.

Littleton, a Denver suburb, in many ways offers a typical middle-American landscape—dotted with drab office parks and Outback Steakhouses. Less typical are the striking, snow-streaked mountains, which loom in the background.

The light-beige Columbine High School building gets threats all the time. It’s the unholiest of holy sites: Several times a day, a security guard told me, random people stop by to take pictures or just to take a morbid look. The guard can’t allow them to do that; he can’t make the kids relive it that often.

Another security guard in the student parking lot kept a wary eye on me. But at 2:45, the glass doors swung open and perfectly normal students burst out of a perfectly normal school, laughing and asking each other about homework assignments. Among them was Kaylee Tyner, a junior who organized Columbine’s student walkout for gun control, which happened earlier this month.

Kaylee Tyner at her home in Littleton, Colo. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

The day I met up with Tyner, she had called a handful of her classmates to her house to make signs for Saturday’s march. Her friends plan to go to the local march in Denver, but Tyner will travel all the way to Washington with her mom. On top of her political advocacy, Tyner is in four AP classes, several clubs, and works as a waitress at a retirement home.

Tyner peeled a sticky note off the window of her Nissan—she’s in a club whose members leave encouraging messages for one another—and drove the four minutes from her school to her house. She put out some snacks and brought up tempera paints from the basement. The other girls trickled in a few minutes later. They huddled around Tyner’s dining-room table and laid out orange, black, and white poster boards. They’re Columbine’s core group of activists, and it’s something they’re surprisingly secure about. Once, a boy said something like “oh, there go the feminists” as they walked by, and one of them, 16-year-old Mikaela Lawrence, said simply, “Chh—yeah!”

The girls might get their news from social-media sites like Twitter, but, they tell me, they’re careful to check it against other sites to be sure it’s not “fake news.” Rachel Hill, a cheery 16-year-old, easily rattled off the gun measures she’d like to see: universal background checks, a ban on bump stocks, higher age limits and longer waiting periods. She painted a sign that read, “I have thought. I have prayed. Nothing changed.”

Kaylee and a few friends work on signs for March for Our Lives on March 21, 2018, in Littleton, Colo.

The day after the Parkland shooting, the halls of Columbine were unusually quiet. Despite all the security, kids at Columbine periodically worry about another shooting happening there. Some of their teachers have panic attacks when the fire alarms go off, the girls said.

“We’re not gonna stop fighting until laws are passed,” said 14-year-old Annie Barrows, laying down her paint brush and hammering her fist into her hand. “There’s blood spilling on the floors of American classrooms.”

Kids who go to Columbine rarely joke about the shooting, but students from other schools sometimes make crass remarks, the girls said. “Going to Columbine, we don’t get to pick the label for our school,” Tyner said. “We’re one of the most infamous schools in America. We’re trying to show people that this affects your community for decades.”

One day in early April 1999, Daniel Mauser, a blond-haired, bespectacled Columbine sophomore, came home and asked his father, Tom Mauser, “Did you know there are loopholes in the Brady bill?”—the national law that requires background checks for gun purchasers. Tom didn’t think much of it. Daniel was on the debate team; he and his conservative classmate, Patrick Neville, would sometimes argue about politics.

Two weeks later, the day of the Columbine shooting, Tom didn’t know whether Daniel was alive or dead for nearly 24 hours. Late that night, authorities called to ask what Daniel had been wearing, or if the Mausers had any dental records. They said the Mausers would hear more in the morning. The following day at noon, the sheriff came along with some grief counselors to tell Tom that Daniel had been shot to death.

The Mausers stayed in the area, but they couldn’t bring themselves to send their surviving daughter to Columbine. Instead, she went to the nearby Arapahoe High School. It, too, had a shooting, after she graduated.

Tom, who worked for the state’s transportation department, took on a second role as a spokesperson for Colorado Ceasefire. He and his son shared a shoe size; he began wearing Daniel’s black-and-gray Vans to testify at hearings. In 2000, he successfully helped push through a measure to close the state’s gun-show loophole. He’s one of the few Columbine parents who speaks out about guns; some others support him but find it too painful to talk about, he says.

Over lunch at Panera Bread, he told me he doesn’t support arming teachers—there’s too much of a risk of crossfire, accidents, or police not knowing who the true “bad guy” is in a hectic shooting situation, he said. And what, are we going to hold first-grade teachers accountable for acting as soldiers would in combat? Many Republicans, he argued, seemingly “cannot acknowledge the danger caused by guns.” (Many Republicans, of course, argue Democrats can’t acknowledge the danger caused by restricting guns.)

One of the most helpful gun measures, he thinks, would be a state- or nation-wide red-flag law, allowing family members or law-enforcement officers to ask a judge to temporarily take away the guns of someone who seems dangerous.

At this point, a woman approached our table to thank Tom for his efforts. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The following day, Tom planned to go for a bike ride in the 70-degree weather, enjoy his retirement a little. But for the moment, he went back to talking about his dead son with yet another reporter. Because Columbine High has a stain, but so does the whole country, and it will endure until there aren’t any more stories like this left to tell. So he tells it.

Like Evan Todd, Daniel Mauser was in the library. Eric Harris insulted him, then fired his rifle and hit Daniel in the hand. Then the mild-mannered Daniel fought back—he pushed a chair at Harris. Harris responded by shooting him in the face.

I sat there speechless as Tom Mauser calmly ate a spoonful of soup. “This is America,” he said.

(Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/littleton-columbine/556358/?utm_source=feed

2 notes · View notes

missizzy · 7 years ago

Text

Habeas for Superheroes, Part 5(Daredevil)

(Read entire fic on AO3)

“So,” Jennifer Many was saying, “A couple of hours ago, the White House issued a statement saying it was ‘deeply concerned’ about Secretary Ross’ words, and is ‘considering’ what actions are appropriate.” She kept her voice all too neutral. “What have you two got to say to that?”

It was the afternoon after the breakout and Ross’ response, and Foggy was still feeling shaken to the core. She doubted she was the only one. She and Matt were with the reporter in her office, and she thought it would’ve been easier to do this interview if the world had started feeling real again.

Or if Karen had been the one doing it. But she’d explained over again how journalists had their ethics, just like lawyers did, and so someone else had to do this one. Foggy wasn’t sure exactly how well Karen kept to those ethics, but hey, she almost certainly did more than Matt did to theirs. They understood, of course, but it still made this a lot harder.

She also wished Marci was there to do that question proper justice. But she was off doing her first interview with a Harlem reporter, her client’s mother alongside her. So she and Matt touched each other’s hands, and he flicked his fingers, and tilted his head when she looked at it.

She briefly considered just how vicious she wanted to be, and settled for, “Well, I’ve always thought our current President was a bit of a coward, but I would’ve thought he would’ve done the right thing in this case.”

Many honestly looked a little shocked when the word “coward” came out. It wasn’t really the done thing to use it to describe Matthew Ellis anymore. It had been used all the time during his first term, but after he’d nearly been dropped into flames on live TV, there’d been the feeling the insult ought to be retired.

But Foggy continued, “I’m sorry, but I can call him nothing else. This situation should be in black and white. Ross should’ve been out of a job before midnight last night. He should have been out of a job as soon as that footage leaked, and the President should be before a Congressional committee right now, answering questions about how he let one of his men imprison four people, three of them American citizens, without trial, lawyers, or even disclosure to the public of where they were. That they haven’t called him before one is cowardice on their part too.”

“Ms. Nelson,” said Many, now looking all too intrigued, “are you insinuating that there was a conspiracy within the Ellis Administration related to this?”

“Well, there had to be,” said Matt. “An operation like the…like what’s been exposed takes the coordinated effort of a lot of people. It’s possible, maybe that President Ellis was not aware what was going on, but if they were keeping this from him, then there is even more question about why he hasn’t disowned the Secretary of State yet. There are a lot of questions we don’t have answers to.”

“Are you hoping to achieve that as well for your clients?”

“It would be nice if we could,” said Foggy. “I think they’d like to know, although of course since we can’t get into contact with them right now, we can only guess at that. Our priority, of course, is getting them able to come home without their being locked up in a secret hole out in the middle of the ocean.”

“Aren’t you worried they might refuse to come here?” Many asked. “After all, there’s little dispute they’ve violated international law themselves, and while certainly it should be lawfully, and fairly, they may still find themselves under arrest.”

“If we are satisfied that their lives will not be at risk,” said Foggy, “and we get the chance to communicate with them, we will of course urge them to turn themselves in. And I think they themselves would willingly come back and do so if they were convinced they would be treated fairly, though I don’t know how the government could get them to believe that as long as Secretary Ross remains part of it, especially when the Attorney General is oddly silent. And even the Secretary of Defense is; if this was truly a war situation, one would expect him to speak, after all.”

“Are you worried their lives might be at risk, then?” There was the kind of glint in Many’s eyes that made Foggy think she was hoping for a yes.

Which got her to stop and think, before Matt ended up answering first. “I don’t think at this point anyone actually wants them dead. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry. One thing we’ve noticed in general in recent months, and the Sokovia Accords reflect this, is a general disregard for the basic safety and wellbeing for superpowered individuals. There seems to be an assumption they can stand any abuse thrown at them, and no thought of how those abuses might interact with their gifts, and when in most case no one knows much about how those powers are affecting their bodies and their health. That straitjacket was obviously suppressing Ms. Maximoff’s powers, and we have no idea what even the amount of time she spent in it did to her.

And of course in recent weeks we’ve started to see a group of armed terrorists roam the streets and murder Inhumans, and nobody seems to be doing much about that even when they blew up a government compound. Imagine what would’ve happened in response had an Islamic group done such a thing. Even a more normal white right-wing group doing it probably would have resulted in arrests. There is a clear message being sent that anyone can do anything they like to someone superpowered without consequences. Consequences exist only for them.” By now Matt was speaking with a passion that made Many look a little surprised. Well, she couldn’t know this was personal for him.

And Foggy very much wanted to lead the conversation away from that vein, so she said, “And in this case, given what kind of rhetoric is being spoken by Ross against our clients, and the fact that it will probably be military people sent to capture them if they’re found, we are worried, yes, that they won’t see taking them alive as the priority. Especially if they’re convinced a fight is inevitable, which of course it might not be. I do hope the government realizes, of course, that if any of our clients is killed by soldiers, and their families wish it, we will pursue redress through any avenue we find open to us.”

There was a knock at the door, and Marci’s voice called, “Foggy? You’ve got a visitor, and one of the type I’m not sure you want to keep waiting too long. Your PA’s entertaining her right now.”

Matt rose very fast to let her in, fast enough that Foggy thought he’d heard and recognized the visitor in question. But Foggy couldn’t think it was any of the Avengers, and surely if it was one of Matt’s newer more local superhero buddies Marci would’ve identified them.

Marci took a look at Many, then said, “I think you might want to finish the interview before she comes in, though.” Definitely someone they didn’t necessarily want the press to know about, then.

There was a moment where Many seemed to consider her options, and what kind of reporter she wanted to be that day. Then she stood up and said, “I actually would like to talk to you, further, Mr. Murdock, of waking up to discover the Black Widow had broken into your apartment, when I understand your wife was at work.”

“Well,” said Matt, “Foggy actually woke me up with the papers; I’d slept a little longer than I’d intended to that day.” He was already walking towards the door, Many following.

“Do you think there’s any chance Ms. Romanov had something to do with that?” Foggy heard her ask as they passed out the door. If Matt had identified his wife’s visitor, he’d no doubt casually stroll the other way.

“I’ll go give her the all clear,” said Marci, and from the way she was now grinning, Foggy was pretty sure she’d recognized the visitor too. As she took her place at her desk, Foggy wondered if it was Vision.

But really, she thought, when Pepper Potts came through the door, that one should’ve been obvious.

“Ms. Potts.” Foggy couldn’t help but smile. All the Avengers had spoken highly of Pepper, and Wanda believed she’d played a huge part in her being admitted into the country even after the Avengers had initially spoken to the U.S. government about how dangerous she was. She knew meeting her just now had probably made Marci’s month, and Foggy couldn’t say she didn’t have some admiration for this smart, powerful woman herself.

She closed the door behind her and said, “I’m afraid the official reason for my being here is currently in dispute. Tony keeps thinking up more and more creative ones to give to the press if we’re ever pushed to. But since you could never give it to them anyway, that’s not your problem, right?”

“Right,” Foggy agreed, but it was harder to keep the smile on, hearing her tone as she talked about Tony Stark. It made her think they had broken up, and it certainly hadn’t been because of her not loving him anymore.

“So,” she came over to Foggy’s desk, grabbing a chair and bringing it over herself before Foggy could get up to do that. “I do have to ask this first: do you have anything to do with what your friend Karen Page has written?”

“Not about Stark, and we’ve got no control over that.” Foggy hastily put up her hands. “Karen does what she wants, writes what she wants, ventures into dangerous places and risks her life for what she wants, and you should see how upset Matt gets about it every time he hears about the last.” The hypocrite, she didn’t add, because she wasn’t one hundred percent sure Pepper knew about that.

“All right, then,” she said. “I thought as much anyway. I mean, I’ve met her.”

Then she said, “So the actual reason I’m here is because I didn’t want to risk putting this conversation on any phone or email lines. I’ll understand completely if you don’t want to tell us this, even if he won’t, but Tony wants to know how much your husband’s likely to go out as his alter ego.”

So she did know. “He doesn’t want any of his help,” Foggy told her. “I don’t think he would, honestly, even if I was inclined to advocate for it, and right now, I’m sorry, but I’m not.” She turned stern on the end of that.

Ms. Potts’ lips didn’t even twitch. “Understood. Though I can’t promise he won’t try to give it, anyway.”

Foggy actually had to chuckle at that. “Do you have any idea how much Stark’s likely to even be in New York City?” she asked.

She shook her head. “I should tell you about that too, because he’s actually been talking about moving upstate completely. Selling the tower, the whole works. I mean, it definitely wouldn’t be tomorrow, even if he did do it. So if you were hoping we’ll get out of your hair fast, sorry.” The smile was weak, but Foggy was impressed she even tried it when her voice was so heavy. “One thing he does want to do, though, is he wants to make sure you both are always able to contact him no matter what. Allow me to point out to you that you can take that means of contact and never use it.”

“I’m willing to take it,” said Foggy. “Can’t speak for Matt, but I’m smart enough not to turn down the immediate means to a powerful ally when it’s offered. Never know when you might need that, especially when suing the President.”

She thought about it another moment, then decided to go forward with it: “Also, Ms. Potts, I would like you to know, if you yourself ever want to talk to me, for any reason at all, I will be happy to make myself available.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was unexpectedly soft, a hint of vulnerability. She bent down to reach into her purse, and took possibly longer than she needed poking about in it before pulling out a card. “He gave this to the other Avengers right after the Incident. The number is one only we’ve had, mostly. You call it, our current system will make sure we both know as soon as we can without anyone else finding out.”

It was a pretty innocuous-looking card for Stark. Foggy carefully put it away in her desk. When she looked up after doing so, Pepper Potts was just looking at her with an unreadable expression, and she found herself saying, “For the record, ‘ever’ includes right now.”

“I don’t want you to ask me any questions.”

“No problem,” said Foggy. “I won’t.” After hearing her tone there, she didn’t have to anyway. “I don’t promise I’ll answer yours, but you can ask them.”

“You really might not on this one,” and she let what was left of her composed face fall away completely as she asked, “Did you ever consider leaving him?”

“Sure,” said Foggy. “When he decided to start running around at night in his black pajamas less than a month before our wedding date.” She tried to keep her own voice steady, and hoped dearly Pepper wouldn’t ask if there had been any other times. That one she would have to refuse to answer. Besides, there had been further circumstances the other time she’d been considering it.

But the next question was, “And have you been sorry you didn’t? At times? For long lengths of time?”

That was a surprisingly easy one. “For moments, mostly. The hard ones especially, including the ones where I was convinced he was going to die, and a tiny bit of me was a little relieved at the thought.” Pepper looked shocked at that, but said nothing as Foggy pressed on. “And telling myself he needed me didn’t even help those times. There’s a point where it won’t anymore, once you realize you’re not going to save him.”

“It’s not our job to save them.” She said it as if she was confirming it to herself.

“Exactly. Even if they try to let you, and I think Matt genuinely did try once.”

Ms. Potts closed her eyes. The tabloids had once told a story about how her boyfriend had retired, or tried to anyway, because of her, and Foggy suspected the basic details of that had been true. He’d given her too long to hope, perhaps.

Then she asked, “Does it get easier? Or harder?”

Foggy had to think about that one, and eventually, she just shook her head. “I can’t answer that one when you’re not me, and the man you’re in love with isn’t Matt. When it comes down to it, my answer as relates to Matt and myself varies by day.” She thought about it a little more, then said, “I don’t think the bad nights get worse, but I don’t think they get better either. Maybe there are less of them, though, once you start figuring out your coping strategies. Though I would think…” She stopped herself; that might qualify as a question.

“I would’ve figured them out already?” Ms. Potts finished; thankfully she didn’t sound bothered. “I had ones that used to work better, which, honestly, mostly involved more CEOing. It’s just that…” She seemed to catch herself, unwilling to admit more to someone who was still pretty much a stranger.

Foggy rescued her as best she could with a gentle, “If it’s you that’s changing and feeling different, well, that’s probably a different problem all together, and one I’m not equipped to give you advice on at all. Sorry.”

Would she herself ever change like Pepper Potts might be changing? Maybe she was a little already. Half a year in this place had rubbed off on her vocabulary and way of approaching things; Karen had made her aware of that a few times. She didn’t think Matt would ever stop loving her, or even wanting her, really, and she couldn’t imagine she would ever stop loving him, but could she turn into someone who no longer wanted him?

She had to suppress a shudder at the thought.

But meanwhile, Ms. Potts had managed a smile, one that looked very real and honest, and she said, “Thank you, Ms. Nelson. You’ve helped me a lot.”

“My friends call me Foggy,” she said. “And I think we really should consider each other friends, even if maybe we don’t see each other too often, Ms. Potts. Not that I’d mind if we do, but even if we don’t.”

“Pepper, then.” And they reached out and shook hands on it. “I’ll get back to you if and when I get a better idea of what Tony’s planning to do about the tower. Or anything else happens you two should probably know about.”

Foggy poked her head out the door first, but Cheryl had already been standing watch. “I think Matt got her into Nick Stoll’s old office,” she said. “He looked like he could keep talking for a long while, too.”

Matt, of course, would know once Pepper was safely out and away from the building, so once Foggy had seen her out without incident, she expected him to be done talking soon. Sure enough, ten minutes after she’d returned to her office, she heard their voices in the hall. But they didn’t come in, but instead headed upstairs together, and twenty minutes after that Matt still hadn’t come back.

Had he been listening in? That wouldn’t have been right of him, especially when it had come to Pepper and her privacy, but maybe he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

She was considering calling him, just to make sure he hadn’t gotten distracted enough to step into an open manhole or something, when Karen called her. “I think you should know,” she said. “Jennifer just got back here, and now Ellison’s offended at you on the President’s behalf. I assume you’re smart enough to know that’s a very bad sign.”

“What did she say that got him offended, exactly?” Foggy asked, telling herself she didn’t care either way.

“Just that you’d called Ellis a coward. I’m allowed to tell you off the record I agree with you there, right?”

“Absolutely, only I have to watch what I say around you.” Foggy didn’t mind; it was comforting to hear someone agree with her on a comment she’d known already was going to provoke some anger. “Look, I know Ellison’s been good to you and everything, but remember he did originally side with Fisk.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” said Karen. “To be fair, most of the men who voiced their agreement with his outrage, well, they were all men for starters, and also, that type of man. The kind I try to avoid being alone with in the break room, and not even because I think they’ll make advances on me, necessarily, but simply because they might go belittling me.”

“So the guys who were going to throw bullshit at three of the four of us anyway, then,” said Foggy, trying to make herself sound completely relaxed, because she’d need to do that even more than usual in the coming days.

“You’ve never gotten hate mail, have you?” Karen’s voice was tiny and sad, the voice of someone who had.

Foggy's first thought then was, Oh God, Matt is going to lose his shit. Out loud she said, “It was probably inevitable anyway. Any tips for coping? For all four of us?”

A pause while Karen thought about it, then, “Try to read as little of it as possible, for starters. I actually don’t even see all of it anymore.”

“You mean leave Cheryl to deal with it? I don’t know if I want to do that, Karen. Also, I don’t know if we can get Marci to leave it be, if she starts getting it.”

“It might not have to be her, especially if Marci does start getting it too. Also, remember you can report death threats to the police, though I don’t always. Hell, there was at least one letter I fear there was a cop involved in. That’ll be your call.”

Just then, outside the door, she heard Cheryl saying, “Mr. Murdock, how long are you going to just stand outside your wife’s door?”

Matt’s response was very soft, a, “I think she might be on the phone with someone?”

Very considerate of him, Foggy supposed, except for the part where he was probably now shamelessly listening in. He had to be listening to her responses to Karen, at least. “Matt’s lurking around outside my door,” she informed Karen. “I don’t know whether or not I want him to participate in this conversation or not.” More quietly, she added, “Although if you don’t, Matt, could you at least excuse yourself or something?”

“All right, all right, I’ll go in,” he said to Cheryl in response. She should’ve known better than to think he’d be willing to walk off.

To the casual observer, Matt as he walked in might have looked a little tired. Foggy knew him better. “Karen,” she said, “can I call you back in a few?”

“Absolutely,” said Karen. “Remember, you don’t have to be nice to him.”

Matt had been listening to that one; she could tell. “Thanks for the reminder,” Foggy said to her lightly. “Bye.” She stood up as she hung up.

“I didn’t hear most of your conversation with Ms. Potts,” he said. “I was able to focus on talking to Many, which helped. But…well, I heard enough to make me think too much, I suppose. I don’t know if there’s even anything to say, I just...”

“Wow,” said Foggy. “Okay. I think we need to keep you out of the vicinity for any further talks I have with Pepper, for your own sake as well as both of ours. Maybe in the future I’ll ask her to meet me somewhere outside of Hell’s Kitchen? I mean, she knows about your hearing, so I’m sure she’ll understand. Though maybe too much; I’m sure those computer systems of Stark’s hear everything in his various properties. Unless they have privacy settings?” Something to ask her about, maybe.

“So you think you two will be talking again?” Matt asked softly. “And not just about whatever Stark’s next up to?”

“Does that bother you?” Foggy asked, in a tone that she hoped conveyed that this wouldn’t impede her.

“No,” Matt said. “In fact, I…I’ll be glad if you have someone to talk to. I know it’s helped you to talk to Karen, of course, but maybe… maybe Pepper Potts can understand things Karen can’t. At least if she takes Stark back.”

“So you think they have broken up?” she asked, then, carefully, “did you hear anything else?”

Matt looked appropriately uncomfortable as he said, “Not exactly. But she just…I don’t know. I could tell from the moment she mentioned his name she was in great pain over him. Then again, so could you, I imagine. And I…well I did keep track of her after she left the building, though she summoned her car on the way out and it arrived before she’d been out there very long. And she was pacing the entire time. Loudly, and that wasn’t just because of her heels. You got to her, probably more than she’ll ever admit to you.”

“And we have to end this conversation now,” Foggy cut him off, but much as she probably shouldn’t know what he’d just told her, she wasn’t sorry to learn it. “Though you know,” she added as she thought of another thing, “do you think maybe we should introduce her and Claire?” Or even Colleen, but of course she fought alongside Danny, so that was kind of a different situation.

“Maybe talk to Claire first,” said Matt. “I mean, Luke Cage is a bit more…” He trailed off, embarrassed.

“Sensible?” Foggy offered.

“Yeah, that. I think, in the end, there are things Claire’s willing to get herself dragged into, and there’s drama maybe you really shouldn’t bother her with. Like me. Definitely like Stark.”

And that, the thought that yes, Tony Stark probably was even more of a headache than this crazy husband of hers, caused the giggles to start to bubble out of Foggy. Matt took his glasses off and did his best to give her a pointed look, which was a bad idea, because it just made her laugh harder. “Like you too, I think,” Matt told her, which did nothing decrease her mirth.

When she had at least calmed down, Matt mused further, “Maybe have Karen talk to Claire with you. After all, she’s actually met Ms. Potts. I’ve never heard her speak badly of her, and when know you she’s the sort of woman Karen doesn’t go easy on.”

“Well, I have heard her criticize her words once, in relation to that whole think that happened in Sokovia, but maybe she’s forgiven her on that…” Maybe it would even do Karen and Pepper good to talk to each other. Of course, their situations remained different for the same reason Karen and Foggy’s situations were different, because Karen had never had to opportunity to be involved with the superhero she loved. Foggy supposed that did make her life easier in one way.

“Anyway,” Matt said, “I should probably also tell you; I got out of Many that Mr. Pulworth is staying in town for at least a couple more days, and that he’s probably going to pull Mrs. Wilson in for an interview after she refused to talk to anyone last night, and I just heard Marci tell her PA she’s headed for to Ft. Hamilton. I’ll try not to get too close to the premises…”

“Wow, you’re actually telling me this.” That by itself pleased Foggy so much she was willing enough to overlook the whole stalking dangerous people in broad daylight thing. Her standards had dropped so much. “Don’t suppose you’ll be able to get much of the guy’s reaction when Marci kicks his ass? You really shouldn’t tell me how she does so after all.” Which was a pity, since Marci no doubt had been spending the hours since their last meeting thinking of ways she could’ve done so already.

Matt smiled, and when she leaned towards him, he took the invitation to lightly kiss her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

#Daredevil #matt murdock #foggy nelson #pepper potts #matt x foggy #tony x pepper

2 notes · View notes

ruminativerabbi · 7 years ago

Text

Guns in America

We give hurricanes and tropical storms names—or the World Meteorological Organization does—primarily to make it possible to reference them without having to remember their precise dates and where exactly they made landfall: talking about Harvey, Irma, and Maria is a lot simpler than trying to reference them as “that storm in Texas back in August…or was it September?” or “that hurricane that ended up on the other side of Florida from the one they expected it to savage.” But although naming them surely does make it easier to talk about them, it also personifies them in a strange way that makes them sound less like unavoidable natural disasters and more like unwanted visitors whose arrival could presumably have been prevented had we only thought in advance to turn off the porch lights and pull in the welcome mat. (By the way, did you know there are only six lists of names used for storms in each separate ocean region, each series repeated every six years other than when super-storm names like Katrina are permanently retired and a new name starting with that letter is chosen? Click here for a list of the names of future storms through 2022.) Still, the practice is probably more useful than wrongminded, and it is at any rate here to stay.

We don’t have a similarly adorable way to refer to the perpetrators of mass shootings, however. Partially that is because the shooters actually have names and so hardly need new ones assigned to them. And using their real names feels right for another reason as well—because it is makes it feel more natural just to blame the shooter for the shooting and be done with it than to ask if society itself bears any responsibility for these horrific acts of bloodshed. And that impetus to look no further than the shooter to explain the shooting is incredibly strong. Indeed, when the President said the other day that the massacre in that Texas church was “about” mental illness and not guns, he was merely giving voice to the siren sentiment that Sutherland Springs had nothing to do with society itself, just with some crazy person who ran amok with a Ruger AR-556 semi-automatic rifle in his hands. And what could that possibly have to do with anyone other than the shooter himself? Yes, it is true that there is the horrific mistake made by the Air Force in this specific case to take into account—an error that allowed a man with a criminal record for uncontrollable violence to purchase a gun he should have been forbidden by federal law to acquire—but that detail, for all it is truly upsetting, is also strangely re-assuring. It was just an error, you see: if the Air Force had correctly entered the shooter’s domestic violence court-martial into the proper federal government data base, then he would indeed have been barred from purchasing the weapon he used to murder all those innocents at the First Baptist Church last Sunday and his victims, including a dozen children, would still be alive. So it’s all about Devin P. Kelly, the shooter. And it’s a little bit about the Air Force. But it’s easy to insist that it’s not about anyone but the shooter…and particularly not about people who hadn’t heard of him or Sutherland Springs, Texas, until last Sunday.

That, however, is only one way to interpret things. If the President is right that this and similar crimes are all manifestations of mental instability on the part of the shooters and thus unrelated to questions of gun safety or gun control, then our nation—that had thirty times as many gun murders in 2015 than Canada, Australia, or Spain—should also have thirty times as many mentally-ill citizens. But I cannot find any survey that suggests that that is even remotely how things are. France, for example, is just behind us in terms of percentage of citizens treated for mental illness, but had one-thirtieth the number of gun murders that we did in 2007 (the last year for which I could find accurate figures)…just the same as the countries mentioned above. So, whatever these figures ultimately mean, they clearly do not mean that we have thirty times the gun murders that other countries have because we have thirty times as many deranged citizens in our midst. (For two interesting surveys comparing the prevalence of mental health issues in various countries, click here and here.) But if that is the case, then why do we have these endless mass shootings to contend with in our country?

Part of the answer does indeed have to do with craziness, but not with the craziness of the shooters. In a Pew Research Center poll conducted last March and April, a full 11% of Americans responded that they did not feel that it should be illegal for mentally ill people to purchase guns. In a Quinnipiac University National Poll conducted last month, 12% of the respondents who live in households with guns responded that they saw no reason for a nation-wide ban on the sale of guns to people convicted of violent crimes. The response from respondents who live without guns was, in a sense, even more astounding: 15% of those responders—all of them people who themselves do not own guns—agreed that there was no need for such a national ban of gun sales to violent criminals. But even harder for me personally to fathom is that 7% of people who live with guns and 4% of people who don’t feel that there is no need to subject would-be gun purchasers to any sort of background checks at all—in other words, that guns should be sold in America in roughly the same way Starbuck’s sells coffee: to whomever walks in and has the purchase price in hand. And one final statistic to ponder: when asked if they agreed with the thought that a ban on the sale of guns to people convicted of violent crimes would reduce gun violence, 39% of people who live in “gun households” disagreed, as did 25% of people who live in households without guns. (Click here to see these statistic in more detail.)

I find all of the above unfathomable. Who are these people that don’t think that keeping guns out of the hands of violent criminals would reduce gun violence? It’s a good question, too: if 25% and 39% average out at 32% of our American population, that would be about 104 million people who don’t see a clear correlation between criminals owning guns and crimes that involve the use of guns being committed. Clearly, I’m missing something here. But what could it be?

The right to bear arms is part of our national culture, part of our distinctive American ethos. The Second Amendment guarantees the right of citizens to belong to armed militias—presumably envisaged by the founders as state-wide fighting forces called into existence to defend the citizenry against outside aggression—but already in our nation’s infancy this was interpreted to guarantee the right of individual citizens to bear arms even outside the framework of organized fighting forces. And the notion that reliance on a central government to make and keep the citizenry safe is invariably going to be a good idea is not a point anyone even slightly conversant with Jewish history can or should argue as though it were a self-evident truth. And so I find myself torn in different directions here, wishing the Jews of Kovno, say, had been armed when the Germans came to take their children, but—without feeling naïve or foolish—simply not believing that kind of danger to be plausibly something we could ever encounter in America.

In my heart, I really do think that America is different…and that the foundational ideas upon which our republic rests and for which it stands really do guarantee our safety more than a Ruger AR-556 in each of our broom closets ever could. And, that being the case, I simply don’t see how anyone can read the Second Amendment to imply that every citizen, even mentally ill individuals or people convicted of violent crimes, has the right to own weapons capable of murdering fifty-eight people in a matter of minutes, as Stephen Paddock did last month in Las Vegas when he started shooting from his hotel room window at concert goers gathered below. When the President said with respect to the massacre in Texas last week that this was a “mental health issue at the highest level,” he was entirely right—but not in the way he meant. Yes, I’m sure that Devin Patrick Kelly will be posthumously diagnosed as deranged. But truly crazy is a nation in which scores of millions of citizens do not believe that making an effort, even an only partially successful one, to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals and mentally ill individuals would reduce gun violence in our land.

Clearly, this problem is not going to be solved with one grand gesture by Congress. But small steps forward are also worth taking. Writing in the Times last week, Nicholas Kristof offered a heartening parallel by pointing out that our nation had one-ninth the deaths in automobile accidents in 2016 than in 1946, and that those seventy years of progress can be explained by the slow, incremental introduction of more and more innovative practices that simply made fatalities in cars less likely: seatbelts, air bags, child safety seats, etc. That is a dramatic change from my father’s generation (my Dad was 30 years old in 1946) to my kids’ generation (my younger son had his 30th birthday earlier this year). And it happened simply because there was a concerted, unambivalent national will to make it happen. And because scientists of various sorts were able to find ways to make cars safer without making them undrivable or unbearably slow or unwieldy. If that happened, and it did, then guns too can become safer. And the laws that govern their use can be made tighter in rational and reasonable ways…and without strangling or stunting the gun-owner’s legitimate right to bear arms. Take a look at Kristof’s article (click here), and you’ll see what I mean. Small steps are worth taking…even if they only yield truly dramatic results over decades.

If Sandy Hook wasn’t enough to bring us to our senses, it’s hard to imagine what would be. And yet…it simply doesn’t seem possible that there is no way at all to reduce gun violence in America. All that is required is some unequivocal national resolve to act…and creative, inspired leaders prepared to lead us up out of this morass into which we have sunk.

1 note · View note

seouldsoul2kpop · 8 years ago

Text

4| The Purge

Trailer| Moodboard | Prev | Next

Characters: Jungkook x reader| BTS| ft Got7 Mark

Summary: For one day, every year, killing is legal, and you’ll kill anyone as long as the price is right. He’ll kill anyone as long as his orders tell him so. Both of you are the top purgers in the business, but what happens if your name ends up on his kill list? What happens if you’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to kill Jeon Jungkook?

Warnings: swearing, smut, kidnapping & implications of abuse

Word count: 1,776

A/N: Things are about to get real serious! I hope you like it, and please let me know what you think

Jungkook & Y/N

I chewed on the remains of my snack, tossing the wrapper aside as I leaned against a brick wall. It was only a matter of minutes before we all received the message that commenced the annual purge. I took in a deep breath, leaning my head back against the wall as I closed my eyes. Tonight was going to be a cold one, but it was practically a death sentence to wear more than one layer, especially if you were planning on purging. I opened my eyes, gazing up at the night sky. You couldn’t see the stars, but I knew they were there, attempting to shine a glimmer of light on an especially dark night. Only a few minutes left; I could feel it.

Suddenly, I heard a muffled plea from the depths of the alley. I turned my gaze without moving a muscle. A dingy light cast a menacing shadow over him, and from the darkest shadows, I couldn’t see him staring back at me, but I felt his eyes burning holes in me. He stood tall, silently watching me as I watched him; he held firmly on the handle of his machete that rested lazily on his right shoulder, it gleamed in the faint light; clearly, he’d spent much time making sure it was sharp and polished enough to cut through more than just flesh. I smirked, finding his demeanor humorous in the grand scheme of things. The action only made him cock his head to the side as he took a step forward, revealing the white mask that hid his face. I placed my hands in my pocket, sighing lightly.

He was one of those people that thought a mask could separate him from all the sins he was surely to commit tonight, and by the looks of it, he was going to get started immediately. I glanced down at the reason he had been brought to my attention, a woman, she was on her knees, her white dress already ripped all over, and her lip was smudged with fresh blood. Her eyes pleaded for me to help her as her mascara ran down her cheeks.

I noticed she was being held down by her hair from someone hiding in the shadows; I could only see their hand squeezing even tighter the longer I stared. I looked away back at the obvious leader calling my attention. He took another step forward, giving me a better look at the bleeding letters on the top of his mask that read one simple word: GOD. He suddenly pointed to me with his machete, holding it for a moment before bringing it to his throat to draw a fake slash along his throat—a picture of what was to come.

This night made me restless. The time was so close; even though I had to wait, I still felt a stir in my stomach waiting for it to finally begin. I didn’t know how to feel about tonight. I was both happy and admittedly nervous for what was to come. It wasn’t every day you were given the chance to exact your revenge without any repercussions.

I didn’t know what to do with myself now. I imagined walking the semi-empty streets, watching as purgers already pinpointed their victims for the night. The philosophy of the common purger: Eat, Shit, Fuck, and Repeat. I laughed at the idea that this was such a medieval day for modern times. Citizens were getting the chance to pillage whatever land they wanted, kill whoever they wanted, and rape whoever they wanted. In the amateur world of the purge, everything was nothing more than a mindless game. In the professional world, my world, everything was a structured game, and the winner is the person with the right strategy, and power, to do so.

My mind jumped to Mark as I thought of people with power. I could see the fire in his eyes just before I felt the touch of his lips on mine as if he was with me, ready to spend another sleepless night with our bodies entangled. I remembered him turning me around on his desk, his hands finding their way beneath my dress, pulling down the fabric that was separating him from me. I smiled in real life as I smiled at him in my memory, his hands finding their way forcefully between my thighs. He wasn’t one to mess around if he was itching for a release.

I bit my lip, remembering him pressing himself fully inside of me. His dominant hand finding my hair, pulling my body into his as he thrusts harder; his other hand digging into my hip. I leaned forward, my hands planted firmly on the desk as he rammed mercilessly inside of me. Every movement felt like a sip of something sweet that only made me have a craving for me. He moaned above, sending a tingle throughout my body. It was something pleasant against the roughness of his touch.

He leaned forward, his lips grazing my ear as he gave me the privilege of hearing his lust up close. He tugged on my hair, pulling my neck closer to his lips, giving my neck deep, hungry kisses. In that moment, I reached back to take hold of his hair, making him thrust inside of me even harder. I could feel myself growing tighter around him. From his lips, to his rough touch, to his throbbing member inside of me; everything about him felt so deliciously good.

I took in a deep breath, pulling myself out of the sultry memory. I smirked; if I had to do it all over, and steal the information from him like I hadn’t done it before, I would definitely make use of his many bedroom talents. I chuckled, out of all the things I should have been thinking about, I couldn’t help myself from taking advantage of my most memorable adventures. It was only a couple moments of bliss though, because nothing could truly erase the events of what was to come.

JK & Y/N: The sound of those familiar sirens echoed throughout the deafening silence. It didn’t matter where you were now, no one could escape this reality, or the monotone voice that penetrated even the most fortified of houses.

One, two, three, four…

This is not a test.

This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge sanctioned by the U.S. Government.

Weapons of class 4 and lower have been authorized for use during the Purge. All other weapons are restricted.

Government officials of ranking 10 have been granted immunity from the Purge and shall not be harmed.

Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.

Police, fire, and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning until 7 a.m., when The Purge concludes.

Blessed be our New Founding Fathers and America, a nation reborn.

May God be with you all.

I finally turned my head towards the masked leader as the final words rang in the air. If I could actually see his face, I would have seen the dark smile that was forming. I watched as he suddenly yanked the girl away from one of his followers, pulling firmly on her hair as the weight of what was finally happening truly hit her. She squirmed under his grasp, reaching out to me.

“Please! Help me!” she crawled at the ground, but she was only pulled back by his tight grip on her hair, “Don’t let them do this to me!” she pleaded, fresh tears streaming down her face, “Please! You have to help me!”

Her shrill screamed echoed through the air, but it was muffled by the other massacres already being committed. I looked up at him, the machete back to resting on his shoulder as he leaned down to her level. He looked at her for a second, then looked back at me, and he waved a few fingers goodbye for her while still holding onto his machete. The act only made her scream more as she was slowly dragged into the darker depths of the alley. Her cries for help were slowly eaten away by the darkness.

I pushed off the wall, my eyes never leaving the alleyway. I stared for a moment. Not once did it cross my mind to save her. I pulled my hood over my head, placing my hands in my pockets as I backed away. Tonight wasn’t a night for saving lives. You die trying to be a good person out here. I shuffled on my feet as I quickly turned, beginning the run to my first target. I grinned; The Purge was finally here.

I could hear the screams start as soon as the announcement came to an end. Safety was now an illusion. It was kill or be killed, and if anyone truly had the desire to kill someone, nothing could get in their way. I leaned forward, crossing my legs into a pretzel on my couch as I reached for my gun. I took hold of it; placing my finger on the trigger, I held it up. It was a full moon, and I could now see my dark silhouette in the TV. I imagined myself shooting myself, and I sluggishly fell back on the couch once more.

“Bang,” I whispered, “You’re dead,” I paused in that instant, imagining what he looked like now, and I pointed my gun up at the ceiling. His face was foggy in my mind, but I knew I would recognize him come the time; I smiled as I pretended to aim at him, “Tell me, what do you want most in this world?”

I had been asked that same question when my life was at risk once, and all I wanted was to live. My face grew serious thinking about the memory; I was told, it was good to ask such a question before killing someone, not necessarily because you care about the answer, but because in a person’s last moments, any wish can come true. I still grappled with the idea; it seemed more like an attempt at righting wrongs as opposed to bringing a person a moment of peace before dying. It was useless to do people a kindness on days like today. Kindness gets you killed. I let my hand fall gently back in my lap, the cold metal of my gun gave me goosebumps, which only made me grip onto it tighter. I smirked once more; it was finally time.

38 notes · View notes

lodelss · 5 years ago

Text

The Endgame of the Olympics

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,722 words (23 minutes)

A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.

The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.

They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.

Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.

The horrors of the pandemic are real and massive. Yet COVID-19 has offered an opportunity to derail the Games — one that didn’t exist just a few months ago and certainly hadn’t existed when the activists came to Tokyo last July. Dr. Satoko Itani, a professor of sport, gender, and sexuality studies at Kansai University, told me that the pandemic is a “powerful wake-up call to the people who otherwise wouldn’t have given a thought about the costs of the Olympics.”

“Now that a lot of people in Japan are counting and monitoring the government’s spending to fight the pandemic, it became ever more clear actually just how much taxpayers’ money we had allowed the TOCOG [Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] and the government to spend on the two-week-long sport spectacle while we don’t have enough money to equip ‘essential workers’ with the essential protective gear,” they wrote in an email.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion.

The Games’ postponement is happening not just against the backdrop of a global pandemic, but also that of a global uprising against state-sanctioned murders of Black people by the police. The catalyst for this movement was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, but the protests quickly spread beyond the Twin Cities to the rest of the U.S. and then around the world, including Japan.

The pandemic, police brutality, and the Olympics are not unconnected events. While COVID-19 might be a virus incapable of racial bias, the course it has taken through the population of the U.S., wending its way through Black, Latinx, and poor communities, was determined by decades of racist policy and discrimination. American police forces have killed Black people for decades with impunity as part of the same system that allowed more African Americans to die from COVID-19 than any other group. It’s also the system that has allowed the Olympic Games in the post-war period to reshape the cities that host the event, rarely for the benefit of all citizens. The Games have been a driving force behind displacement, police militarization, increased surveillance, and violence against the working class and poor people, especially Black and Brown, in the cities where they’ve touched down. The very same groups that the pandemic has disproportionately killed and that the police disproportionately target are those who become the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of the Olympics.

But people are growing wise to what the Olympic Games are actually about. “It wasn’t 15, 20 years ago you could say, ‘We’re going to have a bid in our city,’ and stand behind the podium and jabber on about jobs and economic upticks floating everybody’s boat, and people just nodded along,” Jules Boykoff told me. (Boykoff is a professor at Pacific University and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics and NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond.) “Today, no way. People aren’t nodding along like they once did.”

Over the last decade, residents of potential Olympic host cities have voted overwhelmingly to reject the Games. The IOC and local organizers have lost referenda in Hamburg, Calgary, Graubünden, Krakow, Munich, Sion, Vienna, and Innsbruck. Activists in other cities like Boston, Budapest, and Graz/Schladming managed to turn public opinion against the Games so decisively that the bids were pulled before the IOC and Olympic boosters could be embarrassed by yet another referendum loss. If the anti-Olympics activists have their way, soon no city will be a safe harbor for the Games.

* * *

Resistance to the Games is almost as old as the Games themselves. The very first modern Games in Athens, in 1896, already inspired wariness about using public funds to pay for Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s pet project. Greek prime minister Charilaos Trikoupis didn’t want the state to be responsible for financing the Olympics, and private (mostly aristocratic) donors footed the bill.

Nowadays, a lot of tax money goes into financing Games-related projects, but one practice has persisted to this day: wildly underestimating the cost of running the event. Coubrertin had claimed that the whole thing would cost no more than 200,000 drachmas; as Boykoff writes in Power Games, “the stadium refurbishment alone cost three times that much.”

Rome was originally supposed to host the 1908 Olympics, but many people there protested the decision because of the costs. London ended up taking over hosting duties at the last minute — not because the Italian government suddenly became responsive to the will of its citizens but because Mount Vesuvius erupted less than 200 miles away.

In 1912, the Olympics really hit their stride, at least according to their most ardent supporters — the entire city of Stockholm was taken over by the event. The Games were no longer a thing happening in a city, a footnote to the World’s Fair. (The early Olympics were often held in tandem with the World’s Fair.) In Stockholm, residents couldn’t ignore the Games even if they wished to. “Whereas in London the life of the huge metropolis had not been influenced by the invasion of Olympism, the whole of Stockholm was impregnated by it,” Coubertin said of the 1912 Olympics. That the Olympics have since affected every aspect of life in their host cities is a feature, not a bug, and it’s been there almost from the get-go.

Several subsequent Games were met with resistance and with citizens arguing against a misallocation of public resources. The first Games ever hosted in Los Angeles took place in the middle of the Great Depression; “Groceries, not Games” was the rallying cry of people opposing the 1932 Olympics. In London, which in 1948 was a city still rebuilding after the Nazi bombing campaigns of World War II, people accused organizers of misspending public funds. Right before the 1968 Olympics, Mexican authorities massacred protesters, who, among other things, felt that the money being spent on the Games should instead go to social welfare programs.

The very same groups that the pandemic has disproportionately killed and that the police disproportionately target are those who become the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of the Olympics.

Looking at this history of resistance to the Olympics is simultaneously inspiring and dispiriting. Ordinary people have consistently stood up to the IOC and to their local elected officials and demanded that residents’ needs be met before cities pay for a massive sports spectacle. Yet despite their best efforts, they mostly haven’t succeeded �� at least if we define success as kicking the Games to the curb. In over a century, only one city has managed to cast off the Games after they had been awarded to it: Denver.

“I voted for the Olympics to come to Colorado,” Richard Lamm, former Colorado Governor, told me. At the time he was still in the state’s General Assembly. He had been to the 1960 Games in California’s Squaw Valley and had quite enjoyed himself. He thought it would be a good idea to bring the Olympics to Colorado. A couple of years after that vote, Denver secured the 1976 Winter Olympics. When I asked Lamm what he and his fellow legislators knew about the plans for the Games before they voted, he said that ”the state legislature voted in ignorance.”

But Lamm, a certified public accountant by training, changed his tune when he became chair of the Legislative Audit Committee. He found that the local boosters, who were prominent, wealthy businessmen, grew more and more defensive as Lamm started to ask questions. “They condescendingly looked down on me and said, ‘Just move aside, you’re not being patriotic.’”

This behavior is not unusual for Olympic organizers. They don’t provide much information about what it actually means to host the Olympics, because they recognize that the more people learn, the less they like it. Remember that scene in Clueless where Cher, the protagonist, describes her nemesis as a “full-on Monet”? “From far away, it’s okay, but up close, it’s a big ol’ mess.” The Olympics is the Monet of global mega-sporting events.

Former Governor Stephen McNichols, in his attempt to keep the 1976 Olympics in Denver, appealed to manners and civility. “It’s like inviting somebody to dinner,” he said. “You just can’t tear up the invitation.” (I’m certain that even Emily Post would approve of uninviting someone if that person threatens to turn over the table and smash the china and leave you to clean it all up.)

Despite fierce opposition from moneyed interests, the activists in Colorado managed to get a measure on the ballot in 1972, a constitutional amendment that would prevent any additional public monies from being spent on the 1976 Olympics. The Games’ boosters far outspent the activists, but the latter still won 60 percent of the vote. After the measure to withdraw public funding was passed, the IOC pulled the Games from Denver and moved them to Innsbruck, which had previously hosted them in 1964. (In 2017, Innsbruckers voted against bidding on another Olympics. Two was enough for them.)

Activists in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Paris are hoping to pull off a similar feat to the one that Lamm and Denver activists pulled off nearly half a century ago — but they also want to take it a step further. Not only do they want to rid their respective cities of the Games; they want to end the Olympic Games entirely. They believe that the Olympics bring misery to the already-vulnerable, so why would they advocate for ridding their cities of the Games only to see them pop up elsewhere? That would make them the Olympic Nimbys.

In over a century, only one city has managed to cast off the Games after they had been awarded to it: Denver.

To get rid of the Olympics, they’re going to have to fight both the forces of capital and the sense that these Games, once awarded, are a done deal. When I was in Los Angeles in late 2019, the people I spoke to who weren’t directly involved in activism — Lyft drivers, friends, people at cafes — seemed to believe that it was probably too late to stop them. A sense of inevitability had already set in.

For better and for worse, the pandemic has destroyed that feeling in numerous ways. Before COVID-19, students assumed that if they passed their classes, they’d be able to attend their graduation ceremonies. Engaged couples believed that if they paid for a wedding, their family and friends could come from all over. Olympic athletes may have acknowledged the possibility that they might not make it to the Games due to injury or a weak performance at trials, but never considered that the Games themselves might not happen at all.

“The coronavirus shows how fragile the world system can be… COVID-19 showed [that] everything can come crashing down in dramatic fashion,” Boykoff wrote in an email.

“COVID turned the global economy and our social order upside down,” Jonny Coleman, one of the organizers with the NOlympics-LA group, wrote. “Right now, when I talk to people, almost across the board there is a willingness to imagine a better city.” NOlympics-LA is a grassroots anti-Olympic activist organization that was started in 2017 by the Housing and Homelessness Committee of the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America with the goal of derailing the LA 2024 bid. (Paris ended up with 2024 and, in a weird Hail Mary move, the IOC awarded LA the 2028 Games at the same time, possibly concerned that no one would submit a bid to host the XXXIV Olympiad.) Coleman wrote that the group has seen their membership numbers go up and interest in their work increase since the start of the pandemic. “There’s both an increased interest in specifically anti-Olympic work, exploring alternatives to sports in general, and a lot of interest in the specific issues we organize around: gentrification, displacement, policing, capitalism, and so on… Who knows where [we] can take this?”

(Disclosure: I have been a member of the DSA and will be again once I remember to pay my dues, which will be any day now.)

* * *

One of the activists who has recently come to NOlympics is Aliza Rood, granddaughter of Rodney Rood, an oil executive who was one of the men responsible for bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles in 1984.

“I attended the 1984 Olympics as an 8-year-old while, unbeknownst to me, Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles were actively being decimated in the service of the spectacle,” she wrote in an email. “I’m personally horrified by everything my grandfather helped to ‘achieve’ for LA, I feel a responsibility to assist in keeping the Olympics from returning in 2028 (or ever) to cause further harm.”

That the 1984 Summer Olympics harmed residents of the city might come as a surprise to many. In American collective memory, LA84 is the “good” Olympics. It didn’t sink the city into debt the way that the ‘76 Games did to Montreal. The facilities used to host the sporting events didn’t become ruins with rolling tumbleweeds as those built for the 2004 Games in Athens. And the city didn’t divert funds from public employees to Games-related projects as officials did in Rio right before the start of the 2016 Olympics.

But it was a disaster for some communities in Los Angeles. A Black Enterprise article from 1991 described the toll the 1984 Games took on Black-owned businesses in the city. “When it came to generating revenues for black owned businesses, I would give the Los Angeles Olympics an F,” Congresswoman Maxine Waters said at the time. Many Black business owners had been verbally assured by local organizers that they would have access to Olympic venues. They took on debt to make the improvements needed to compete in the Olympic marketplace. But they were shut out.

Olympic organizers were not sending any foot traffic to those businesses, either. Though half the athletes were being housed in the USC dorms located in South-Central, they were actively discouraged from exploring the surrounding neighborhoods and speaking to locals.

Black lives didn’t matter to the organizers of the 1984 Olympics. And Black activists in LA haven’t forgotten what the Olympics did to their community.

“Upon moving into the USC Olympic Village in 1984, we were told to be mindful of where [we] were going outside of the large walls and barriers that surrounded the Village,” Tracee Talavera, a member of the silver medal-winning U.S. 1984 Olympic gymnastics team, said in an email. “We were told not to go past the fences and if we did venture past the Village barriers, the USOC would not be responsible for our safety.”

Judging from how the city and the USOC treated them in the run-up to the Games and beyond, it’s clear that LA’s Black and Brown residents weren’t thought of as people who deserved to benefit from an event framed as a public good. Instead, they were treated like a security problem — as if the Olympics and its attendees had to protect themselves from them. Ahead of the 1984 Olympics, the LAPD went on a hiring spree, bringing additional cops onto the force to deal with the threat that the local population allegedly posed to the proceedings. These officers — and the rest of the force — were armed to the teeth.

In conjunction with the FBI and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the LAPD started rounding up Black and Brown youth and homeless people. Many of these sweeps took place right around the city’s Olympic stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

“We saw how people were pushed out on the street, how all of the homeless people were being pushed out of downtown and pushed in the periphery,” Leonardo Vilchis, an East LA organizer and co-founder and co-Director of Union de Vecinos, said. “There was this very aggressive policing around the homeless community; a lot of our people were put into jail.”

Black lives didn’t matter to the organizers of the 1984 Olympics. And Black activists in LA haven’t forgotten what the Olympics did to their community. They, more than any other group, recognize that events like the Olympics, which expand police budgets and powers, pose a major threat to their safety. Black Lives Matter-LA was one of the earliest coalition partners for NOlympics; their work against the 2028 Games predates the formation of the NOlympics working group.

The LAPD has made it clear that hosting the Olympics in 2028 — and before that, the Super Bowl in 2022 and the World Cup in 2026 — will require an expansion of their budget and of policing in the city in general. Jamie McBride, director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, recently discussed Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed cuts to the LAPD’s budget, and said that “If he cuts the budget, we’re going to be so far behind I don’t think it’ll be safe to have the World Cup here. I don’t think it’ll be safe to have the Olympics here.” Hosting the Games is not remotely compatible with current popular demands to defund the police, and McBride wanted to be sure that we all realized that.

McBride is probably right. It will be impossible to secure the Games in the way we currently understand “security” — surveillance, mass arrests, targeting of minorities — if the budget of the LAPD is slashed. But McBride is actually making the activists’ arguments for them, explaining precisely why we need to call the whole thing off.

“Any time you talk about putting more resources into policing, you’re talking about taking those resources away from things that actually make the people that we care about safe,” Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-founder of BLM-LA, said at an anti-Olympic forum held in 2017.

“When we talk about putting police on the streets it means putting people with guns who are there trained to see us with targets on our backs and our fronts,” she said.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Vilchis, the East LA organizer, agrees. “We saw the continuity from 1984 to 1992 with the riots.” This is a point that many other activists and academics have made over the years — that you could draw a line from the militarization of the police in 1984 to the 1992 uprising. The LAPD didn’t fire the officers it had hired for the ‘84 Games; they just found ways to use them, notably by deploying them to terrorize Black communities. They also didn’t give back the fancy weapons they had received from the federal government for ‘84. That tank-like vehicle that they got for the Games? They used it for drug raids. In one incident, they took down the wall of a suspected drug house only to find a mother and her children eating ice cream.

The militarization of local forces, mass arrests, and mass surveillance did not stop with the 1984 LA Games; they’ve all become even more prominent Olympics staples since 9/11.

“There are […] standardized, globalized security models associated with the Olympics, and that involves the heavy use of exclusionary zones around sports venues where public space gets privatized; the heavy use of private security corporations in public space; militarization of local police forces,” Dennis Pauschinger, a professor whose research has focused on the security at sports mega-events, told me last year. (He’s also affiliated with the anti-Olympic activists in Hamburg that defeated that city’s bid.) “Also what happens is always a huge mobilization of CCTV cameras and other surveillance technologies.”

And as we saw with LA, the security upgrades aren’t short-lived; they remain even after the athletes have gone home. “It’s called the security legacy of the Games,” Pauschinger told me.

The militarization of local forces, mass arrests, and mass surveillance did not stop with the 1984 LA Games; they’ve all become even more prominent Olympics staples since 9/11.

Organizers and politicians will argue that they have to do everything in their power to keep athletes and spectators safe, but Pauschinger argues that the security measures are almost always in excess of what is actually needed to secure the event. If something does happen, they will be asked why they didn’t pull out all the stops — so they preemptively terrorize whole communities for the sake of appearing to do something.

But it’s not just the athletes and spectators that officials are concerned about protecting. They are worried about protecting their product, too. “The security is put into place with the justification of the War on Terror… but also to protect the highest and best product they have, which is the World Cup and the Olympic Games,” Pauschinger said.

Sometimes, the security itself becomes the product. Pauschinger said that mega-events like the Olympics and the World Cup have become showrooms for security and surveillance technologies, such as the ALSOK Reborg X model, a surveillance robot that NOlympian Spike Friedman encountered when he went to Tokyo for last summer’s transnational activist summit. “The robot is designed to scan crowds and target individuals who are too ‘jittery’ or have skin that is too ‘red tinted’ as these are supposedly signs that someone is about to commit a terrorist act,” and not, say, that they’re having an allergic reaction to something they ate. The potential here for racial and ethnic profiling is terrifying. But if these robots are shown to “work” — and I’m not sure how we’d measure success here — then you’d probably see them popping up all over, perhaps even at future Olympic Games.

In fact, the security industry in Japan has the Olympics to thank for its very existence. According to Tokyo 2020’s own promotional materials, the country’s security sector came into being in preparation for the 1964 Olympics. The upcoming Games have been a boon to the very same industry; in the name of security, the ISDEF, a large Israeli security and weapons expo, was held outside of Israel for the first time. One of the reasons cited for hosting this event in Kawasaki was the 2020 Olympics. Itani, professor at Kansai University, said that some activists managed to sneak inside the event and saw that weapons were being advertised there in addition to high tech security and surveillance equipment on display. The Olympics, which claim to be a movement promoting peace and unity, are used to rationalize the buying and selling of arms.

* * *

One legacy of the Games that no one puts in promotional materials is that of displacement.

According to a report from the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, more than two million people — most of them poor — have been displaced from their homes since 1988 in order to make room for Olympics-related projects. Most of the activists I spoke with put displacement at the top of their concerns. This issue is not separate from the racism and police brutality highlighted by BLM activists. The unhoused are particularly vulnerable to over-policing and violence, and more often than not, the people who are displaced by events such as the Olympic Games are poor and marginalized.

Concerns over displacement and housing were foremost on the agenda when I attended a NOlympics meeting last September. NOlympics is partnered with more than two dozen organizations in California, including Black Lives Matter, K-Town for All, Union de Vecinos, SAJE, LA Tenants Union, and several others. The work of several of its partner organizations is focused on housing insecurity and displacement in the city.

The meeting, which was convened to discuss the Tokyo summit that many of the activists had attended in July 2019, was held at the Skid Row offices of one of its other coalition partners, Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA-CAN). The setting, one of the most visible encampments for the unhoused in the U.S., provided an object lesson in what happens when resources are shifted from social programs meant to serve the poor to mega sporting events for the global elite. All of the messaging inside LA-CAN was a response to the homelessness crisis — LA’s unhoused population increased by 12 percent in 2019; things are looking even more grim for 2020. Of the few folding tables pushed up against the perimeter of the room, one was laden with leaflets, bumper stickers, totes, and zines, all with some sort of anti-Olympics or housing-justice message, such as “Homes, Not Hotels.” Brewster, a small mutt belonging to one of the activists, was wearing an orange bandana with a pin that read “Services not sweeps.” Even the dog was on message.

According to Boykoff, the form that Olympic displacement takes usually depends on where the Games are being held. In the global north, it’s usually the racist market forces of gentrification that do the dirty work. In the global south, however, the displacement is usually achieved through force. To prepare for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government pushed more than a million people out of their homes. More than 77,000 people living in favelas lost their homes to make way for the 2016 Olympics.

Atlanta went to great lengths to rid the city of as many poor residents as possible before the 1996 Olympics, issuing people one-way bus tickets to leave the city, and making them put it in writing that they wouldn’t come back. Anita Beaty, the former executive director for the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, “came into possession of piles and piles of arrest citations pre-printed with the designations ‘homeless’ and ‘African-American,’” according to a 2016 radio story. Over 9,000 Atlantans were arrested during the lead-up to the Games.

The 1996 Olympics also led to the destruction of Techwood, the oldest public-housing project in the United States. The housing project stood on valuable Atlanta real estate in the center of the city, next to Georgia Tech and the Coca-Cola headquarters. By the time the athletes arrived in Atlanta, the housing projects were gone and so were their former residents. The transfer of public resources to the private sector was complete.

“It’s not a coincidence that they happened to be the residents of public housing because that’s the easiest target. It was sitting on this prime location by the national stadium,” Itani said of the homes destroyed for 2020. To make this even more horrific, these razed buildings were constructed for Japanese citizens displaced by the 1964 Games. And worse still, the buildings destroyed for the 1964 Games had been built for people left homeless by World War II and soldiers returning from the conflict. Boykoff and Nation columnist Dave Zirin interviewed two elderly women who had been displaced twice.

Displacement isn’t just about losing the roof over your head; it’s about losing the community you’ve built over the course of years.

The move to displace low-income residents in LA has already started. Right across from Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was used for the ‘32 and ‘84 Games, are a couple of blocks of two-story homes, broken down into apartments. These will be gone by the time the 2028 Olympics kick off, and so will the people who have lived in them for decades. What attendees will see instead is the Fig, a gleaming 4.4-acre mixed-use development that’ll contain a hotel, private student housing, and residential units, some of which will be set aside as so-called “affordable housing.”

LA city councilmember Curren Price, Jr., who put forth the motion for the Fig, said that the city “must balance the need for affordable housing with the needs for hotel rooms.” A preposterous thing to think, let alone say aloud, in a city where there is a pressing houselessness crisis, one that is getting worse by the day. And that was before COVID-19. Activists are bracing themselves for thousands of evictions once the moratorium is lifted.

Displacement isn’t just about losing the roof over your head; it’s about losing the community you’ve built over the course of years. Hundreds of people were displaced from London’s East End to make way for the 2012 Olympics when the Clays Lane housing estate was destroyed to make way for Games-related construction, and those forced to leave mourned not just the loss of their physical home but the community that the unique complex, replete with communal living spaces and a cafe, engendered. “We’ll never see the likes of this kind of community again,” Ed Doherty, one of the residents who was forced to leave, said.

Giselle Tanaka, an organizer in Brazil working in the social housing movement, told me that some of the displaced from London sent notes of encouragement to those facing eviction in Rio. “They said messages like, ‘We know what you’re suffering, and we hope you have more success than us,’ because those people were evicted in London.”

Itani told me that some of the senior citizens who were displaced for the 2020 Games had asked if they could be resettled together to keep their community intact. That request, they said, was denied.

When demolition of the Kasumigaoka public housing complex began in July 2016, it was after a protracted battle with the last three remaining households, who had resisted the city’s eviction orders. One of the elderly residents died while protesting their upcoming forced relocation.

You can also lose your claim to the city in smaller ways. Boykoff described watching a father playing catch with his child on a cement patch in Tokyo. He later learned that they could no longer play on grass at a neighboring park because a warm-up track was being constructed on top of the grass, right where people used to play baseball.

* * *

Should the Olympics cease to exist? It’s a question I never thought I’d ask. I did gymnastics when I was younger and have been thoroughly obsessed with the sport ever since. I even built my writing career around gymnastics, so the Olympics — where the sport is a perennial favorite — factor heavily into my work (and my income).

“I had an emotional attachment to the Olympics growing up as an athlete,” Itani said. “It’s such a well-produced media spectacle. It’s amazing to see these athletes, the quality of the camera, the angles, the stories of the athletes in the Olympics that are covered by the media.”

I experienced the same emotional attachment that Itani described — and still do. I was aware of all of the harm that the Olympics brought to communities but I took a reformist approach: we could preserve the good and eliminate the bad through smart policies and transparency. But reform hasn’t worked. In 2014, the IOC introduced Agenda 2020 to make reforms to the bidding process and curb the excesses of hosting the Games. Yet the tab for Tokyo 2020 is more than triple what was originally projected.

Nobody’s right to participate in sports justifies the amount of destruction and the violence that goes into hosting the Olympics.

“It took me a while to really digest the critical writings about the Olympics,” Itani said. It was visiting Vancouver in 2010 and Rio in 2016 and seeing the damage firsthand that helped them let go of that emotional attachment. “Nobody’s right to participate in sports justifies the amount of destruction and the violence that goes into hosting the Olympics. People understand on many levels that this is not a good idea but something about the Olympics makes it so hard for people to say no.”

And even if you get to the “no,” the powers that be will force you to offer up alternatives. Well, if you say no to the Olympics, how will we get all those jobs and all those tourists? If you say no to this luxury housing development, what do you propose to build in its place? It’s a twist on the first rule of improv: “No, and.” But “no” can be a full sentence. It is enough.

“The saying ‘no’ is really your real goal, to stop these things. When you already start thinking that, ‘Oh, this a done deal, we have to negotiate,’ you’re not just negotiating your defeat. You’re preparing for your exit, for your displacement, for your criminalization,” Vilchis said.

People might finally be ready to say “no” to the Olympics, to the police, and to many other oppressive institutions as Vilchis, Itani, and many others have done. They’re not willing to wait for things to get worse.

Back in 2017, at the NOlympics forum, someone asked about the potential for an uprising after the next LA Olympics, similar to what happened in 1992. Abdullah replied, “Let’s not wait until after to have the uprising. Let’s do that shit now.”

* * *

Dvora Meyers is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in several publications, including Deadspin, the Guardian, and Texas Monthly. She also writes a newsletter about gymnastics called Unorthodox Gymnastics.

Editor: Ben Huberman Factchecker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

from Blogger https://ift.tt/31wpYkq via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

ecoorganic · 5 years ago

Text

The Endgame of the Olympics

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,722 words (23 minutes)

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion.

* * *

The very same groups that the pandemic has disproportionately killed and that the police disproportionately target are those who become the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of the Olympics.

Looking at this history of resistance to the Olympics is simultaneously inspiring and dispiriting. Ordinary people have consistently stood up to the IOC and to their local elected officials and demanded that residents’ needs be met before cities pay for a massive sports spectacle. Yet despite their best efforts, they mostly haven’t succeeded — at least if we define success as kicking the Games to the curb. In over a century, only one city has managed to cast off the Games after they had been awarded to it: Denver.

In over a century, only one city has managed to cast off the Games after they had been awarded to it: Denver.

“The coronavirus shows how fragile the world system can be… COVID-19 showed [that] everything can come crashing down in dramatic fashion,” Boykoff wrote in an email.

(Disclosure: I have been a member of the DSA and will be again once I remember to pay my dues, which will be any day now.)

* * *

Black lives didn’t matter to the organizers of the 1984 Olympics. And Black activists in LA haven’t forgotten what the Olympics did to their community.

“When we talk about putting police on the streets it means putting people with guns who are there trained to see us with targets on our backs and our fronts,” she said.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

The militarization of local forces, mass arrests, and mass surveillance did not stop with the 1984 LA Games; they’ve all become even more prominent Olympics staples since 9/11.

And as we saw with LA, the security upgrades aren’t short-lived; they remain even after the athletes have gone home. “It’s called the security legacy of the Games,” Pauschinger told me.

The militarization of local forces, mass arrests, and mass surveillance did not stop with the 1984 LA Games; they’ve all become even more prominent Olympics staples since 9/11.

* * *

One legacy of the Games that no one puts in promotional materials is that of displacement.

Displacement isn’t just about losing the roof over your head; it’s about losing the community you’ve built over the course of years.

Itani told me that some of the senior citizens who were displaced for the 2020 Games had asked if they could be resettled together to keep their community intact. That request, they said, was denied.

* * *

Nobody’s right to participate in sports justifies the amount of destruction and the violence that goes into hosting the Olympics.

* * *

Editor: Ben Huberman Factchecker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

https://ift.tt/3gDYOP5 from Blogger https://ift.tt/3kngXmA

#Blogger

0 notes

blockheadbrands · 7 years ago

Text

How Former Mexican President Vicente Fox Went From Drug Tsar To Legalization Trailblazer

Stephen Woodman of Herb Reports:

During his six years in office, Vicente Fox oversaw aggressive efforts to destroy marijuana crops in the Mexican countryside. Now, he’s become one of the most important voices for legalization in North America.

The tiny Mexican village of San Cristóbal is not somewhere you would immediately associate with North America’s cannabis revolution. Smoking weed is still illegal there and there are no headshops in town, just a sleepy plaza ringed by narrow, cobblestone streets.

But the most recognizable of the town’s 3,000 residents—Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico—has recently become one of the continent’s highest-profile cannabis legalization advocates.

Last month, Fox hosted the CannaMexico World Summit at his family’s San Cristóbal ranch, a two-day conference designed to promote legalization and fuel the growth of a Mexican marijuana industry. Fox also uses the complex to meet with journalists, arguing that Mexico’s spiraling violence warrants a new strategy that takes cannabis out of the hands of criminals. He believes that continental cannabis legalization could create a dynamic new industry, delivering jobs and profits on both sides of the border.

“It’s absolutely contradictory that the United States legalizes and Mexico still has prohibition,” Fox told Herb at a recent visit to his ranch. “We have to join in with new trends in the world. Mexico has to be on the vanguard.”

A former Coca-Cola boss, Fox is best known for ending 71 years of one-party rule with his election in 2000. Nevertheless, as president, he failed to deliver on his ambitious economic promises.

Freed from the constraints of elected office, Fox now provokes change from outside the corridors of power. Even his clothing reflects this: the trademark navy suit is gone, replaced today with a bright yellow button-up, blue chinos and running shoes.

Yet despite this more relaxed role, Fox is clearly keen to retain influence. In 2007, the year after he left office, he opened a presidential library on his San Cristóbal ranch. Portraits of the former leader are mounted on walls throughout the lavish complex and the basement library displays gifts offered by various world leaders, including a riding saddle he received from former U.S. president George W. Bush.

Much has changed about his stance on cannabis—and drugs in general—since he was president. Throughout his six-year term, Fox oversaw aggressive efforts to destroy marijuana crops in the Mexican countryside as part of his commitment to fight the drug trade.

JUAREZ, MEXICO – MARCH 20: A man lays dead in the street after being shot on March 20, 2010 in Juarez, Mexico. The border city of Juarez has been racked by violent drug-related crime recently and has quickly become one of the most dangerous cities in the world. As drug cartels have been fighting over ever lucrative drug corridors along the United States border, the murder rate in Juarez has risen to 173 slayings for every 100,000 residents. President Felipe Calderón in 2009 disbanded the corrupt local police force and sent 10,000 soldiers to Juarez, but the violence has raged on. With a population of 1.3 million in Juarez, 2,600 died in drug-related violence last year and 500 so far this year, including two Americans who worked for the U.S. Consulate last weekend as they returned from a children’s party. (Photo by Spencer Platt via Getty Images)

Today, Fox says his opinion on legalization has changed because crime levels tied to the drug trade have gone up. There were 11,806 murders across the country during Fox’s last year in office, compared to 21,459 homicides during his successor Felipe Calderón’s final year.

There is no way to isolate the impact of marijuana prohibition on this death toll, but we do know that the criminalization of any drug typically fuels violence. And although official figures do not signal which are cartel-related deaths, one study estimates that organized crime was to blame for more than half of the murders during Calderón’s term.

In response to the growing homicides, Calderón deployed thousands of soldiers against the cartels and targeted major kingpins, something which Fox describes as a “terrible historical mistake” because it stoked the violence by splintering large trafficking gangs into dozens of smaller, competing factions.

Current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has continued this militarized strategy. And based on the numbers documented for the first four months of 2018, Mexico looks set to record more than 31,000 murder victims for Peña Nieto’s final year in office.

The illegal narcotics trade and the government’s war to stop it has caused unprecedented violence in Mexico since 2006. (Photo by Scott Brennan)

Consequently, since leaving power, Fox has joined other former Latin American presidents in denouncing prohibition. His Mexican predecessor Ernesto Zedillo, former Colombian president César Gaviria and former Brazilian head Fernando Cardoso have also called for the decriminalization and regulation of drugs, including cannabis.

In the case of Fox, however, it’s difficult to say how much he genuinely had a change of heart. His former position on drugs—including cannabis—was undoubtedly in part motivated by politics. Despite the slow but steady relaxation of cannabis prohibition laws, a majority of Mexicans are still opposed to legalization, with only 29 percent in favor, according to a survey by the polling firm Parametría.

“I wish they [the former presidents calling for legalization] hadn’t waited,” says Raul Elizalde, an activist who won a Supreme Court ruling for his epileptic daughter to use medical cannabis in 2015. “Why don’t they support it when they’re in power? Maybe they lacked the courage, but at least they are doing it now.”

It is still against the law to sell recreational cannabis in Mexico, as it is everywhere in Latin America except Uruguay, which became the first country in the world to fully legalize in 2013. Nevertheless, Mexico began gradually liberalizing its cannabis laws in 2009, when the government decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs. In 2015, the Supreme Court granted four legalization advocates the right to grow and consume their own marijuana.

“The ruling was historic,” says Juan Francisco Torres-Landa, a lawyer and one of the four plaintiffs. “Our main purpose was to make sure this topic was on the agenda, and that has been the case ever since.”

Mexico’s Supreme Court granted another individual the right to grow cannabis for personal consumption in April. And last year, the government legalized the sale of some marijuana-based medicines.

The topic has proved so divisive, however, that the leading presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has barely mentioned it in the run-up to the elections in July. His closest rival in the polls, the right-left coalition candidate Ricardo Anaya, has remained ambivalent, saying he is open to debate but that drug legalization would not resolve Mexico’s security problems.

“While they are campaigning they don’t want to speak about this issue,” Fox says. “They think that it’s negative for voters.”

Former president of Mexico Vicente Fox explains why he thinks marijuana should be legal in Mexico. Here, he is seen at his educational center called Centro Fox in Guanajuato, Mexico. (Photo by Scott Brennan for Herb)

Nevertheless, support for reform has risen from just seven percent recorded by Parametría in 2008, suggesting attitudes have shifted as Mexicans have watched Uruguay—as well as nine U.S. states and Washington D.C.—opt for legalization.

Consumption has also risen steadily in recent years. As of 2016, 8.6 percent of the population had tried cannabis compared to 4.2 percent in 2008, according to Mexico’s National Addiction Survey.

Fox says he has never used cannabis himself, although he is open to trying it in the future.

“When I go to a speaking conference I have a tequila or a glass of wine before,” he says. “It puts you in a much better mood…This is what you can get out of marijuana.”

Fox would like to see a robust continental cannabis market as the plant is incorporated into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), allowing Mexican farmers to grow weed for their northern neighbors. Last year, he projected Mexico could eventually produce up to 60 percent of legal cannabis consumed in the United States.

His family has farmed in Guanajuato for five generations and he would happily grow the plant in the future.

“We are always open to diversification,” Fox says, but the “first step is it has to be legal.”

Nevertheless, he concedes that Donald Trump’s rise to power represents a challenge to this aspiration. It’s difficult, he says, to advance legalization with “an ignorant president” heading the U.S. government.

Fox believes a thriving cannabis industry in Mexico would provide economic opportunities for those currently operating outside of the law, including small-scale farmers who have little option but to grow weed for cartels.

He concedes that criminal groups in Mexico could turn to kidnapping, extortion and other crimes that more directly impact law-abiding citizens if continental cannabis legalization triggered a curb in profits. Yet in the long term, he argues that cutting the supply of money from the U.S. market is the only way to disempower criminals.

Cartels “are very active on many fronts,” Fox says, but “the easiest way” for them to make money is through drugs.

The authorization of marijuana sales in the United States has already had an impact on cartels and cartel-related violence. Last year, U.S. Border Patrol seized less than 900,000 pounds of marijuana, compared to more than 2.4 million pounds in 2013, the year before retail pot shops began opening in the United States. To make up for the shortfall, cartels have turned to importing more potent drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine.

Fox would like to see these drugs legalized eventually as well, although he argues that full legalization of weed alone could offer drug traffickers the opportunity to move out of the shadows.

“With a new culture, a new way of thinking, all those criminals for the first time have options,” Fox says. “We can move out of criminalization—with death, blood on the streets, underground activities—into a new industry. That’s a real change.”

TO READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE ON HERB, CLICK HERE.

https://herb.co/marijuana/news/vicente-fox-cannabis-legalization-drug-war-mexico

0 notes

ionecoffman · 7 years ago