CASIMIR NOZKOWSKI is the dude that makes RAFI and I appear to be funny. What CAS is doing is evolutionary work. By taking filmmaking and placing it in the hands of ANYONE with a camera and a desire to tell a story he is giving a voice to the voiceless.
CAS isn’t alone either. The iNternets Celebrities have a few awesome projects slated to drop in a few days or so. We are going in deep. Yep, we are about to go there. I hope you party people come along for the ride with us.
Chocolate Snowflake just reminded me of a little incident we had on our train ride up to Montreal. I sort of put it out of my mind, but it can serve as a lesson to all of us that in some instances our reputations precede our arrivals.
The Amtrak ride to Montreal is a picturesque twelve hour trip. The track bed runs along the Hudson River and through mountain passes in the Adirondacks. I quickly forgot who I was and immersed myself into the views of farms, with cattle and horses and little Main Street upstate New York townships. When we arrived at the Canadian border I signed off on my customs form and gave it to the border patrol officer.
The officer looked at my passport and me several times. He asked me for my social security number and he checked it off on the manifest printout he was holding. At that point he told me that he would need to take my passport to another officer for verification. I said “Okay” and shrugged my shoulders. This was prah’lee one of those cases where Canada has to limit the number of Blacks coming into their country. How else do you think they maintain a totally FREE universal healtcare system?
When the officer returned he told me to walk to rear of the car where the other officer was holding my passport. This was a bit odd since no one else in the car had been singled out for “verification”. The officer that was awaiting me had a longer printout in his hands. He asked me for my name and my social security number. After I repeated my particulars he asked me a question in his Canadian accent…
“Have you ever been before a magistrate?”
“Come again?”
“Have you ever been before a magistrate or justice?”
WTF is this nigga talking about? Have I ever been arrested? Hells chea! I start telling him the story of the first time I was arrested. You folks know that GOD lives in the details so I go in on the whole crack scene in 1986 (this is a story I have in draft form here at the DP Dot Com server. I want to give it to y’all, but it reminds me of my dad and how good a man he was, and then I get sad when I think about how I disappointed him).
After that I start to tell him about the time that ThunderCracker, SoundWave and I were nabbed in the Bronx in a whip we had stolen. That really wasn’t what the officer wanted either. He was interested in the charge that was called ‘Theft Of Services’. Oh shit! That was the last time I had been arrested. That was an embarrassing moment because it was some serious da-dunt-da-dunt shit. I was arrested in a sweep of subway turnstile jumpers. I caught a case for basically not having a dollar and a quarter.
That is some poor dumb nigga bullshit.
The Canadian border patrolman agreed that was some poor dumb nigga shit and he returned my passport to me and told me to take care.
True fucking story is that I stay winning because I stay losing.
BILLY X. SUNDAY reflects his thoughts while America’s war on the poor continues unabated.
Since I’m prah’lee like the only cat at this site that has intimate knowledge of the peripherals into the Sean Bell murder case I would be remiss for not submitting my $.02 (even though I still don’t have my W-2 from Harris – WTF?!?).
BOL raises an interesting point with the fact that Sean Bell’s economic status has as much to do with his murder than any other factor. Poor people in the United States stay losing. That’s just the facts of life playboys. We were all born to die. Poor people were just born to die faster and harder (no Daft Punk shiny leather pantsuit).
Peep all the shit that poor people have to endure in their lifetime… State sanctioned terrorism from the police, a legal system that prosecutes them even when they are victims, mis-education from derelict public schools and malnutrition from the quarter water corner store a/k/a bodegas. Someone needs to clone poor people because they survive some brutal shit on the regulack.
Sean Bell and his friends were poor people. The types of kids that would never think of taking a few stacks and putting that paper into an IRA Roth account. They prah’lee don’t even have checking accounts. The bar they went to was on the outskirts of their local neighborhood. Poor people typically don’t stretch themselves past the environs of the place they grew up. Shit is too complicated outside of the cocoon. Human relationships are too complicated with people who aren’t from the same neighborhood. Sheeeeeit, human relationships are already complicated enough with people in the same ‘hood.
In the county that Sean Bell lived in I can think of a dozen stripclubs better than the one he went to, but because he was poor he wasn’t going to find himself in an area that would be new or different. I keep saying that Sean Bell was poor. I don’t think you understand me though. Being a poor person doesn’t have to mean that you have no money or no expectations of yourself. It just means that you are mired in a caste system that devalues your existence. Sean Bell was going to be married the following evening so he obviously had expectations for himself, but he was raised in a community where the average person doesn’t achieve higher levels of education.
Let’s be clear on something else. I am part of the working poor myself. I have been waiting on my paper from XXL for so long that my cable and my phone are both disconnected, so I understand why Sean Bell ended up in that rundown shithole of a stripclub on the outskirts of the badlands. The police were poor people as well. Don’t think for a minute that even detective grade police officers can’t be poor people. Keep in mind that these men have a level of education equal to Sean Bell’s. These cops might even have been underachievers during their school career. Joining the police force in some ways is akin to signing up for the army. It gives the underachievers some measure of power and control when they never had these things previously.
The night of Sean Bell’s murder was a cocktail of drunken poor males, and several of them had guns. The drunks with the guns also owned a ‘Get Out Of Jail’ free card better known as a police badge. This exemption is critical since it allows the police to sober themselves and corroborate their stories prior to being presented to a query on their conduct. Ultimately, it is still the story of poor people killing one another. I wouldn’t expect you to not be upset about the turn of events that finally acquitted the police of murder. It is a shameful story of the abuses of conduct and deadly force. Similar to the story involving the Blackwater USA mercenaries that took place in Baghdad.
This is the modus operandi of supremacy. Poor people killing each other and being eaten by the system.
Wash, rinse and repeat.
Main Source via 90.3 Nassau Community College Radio
Dedicated to…
SEAN BELL,
AMADOU DIALLO,
PATRICK DORISMOND,
ANTHONY BAEZ,
ELANOR BUMPURS,
MICHAEL STEWART,
RONNIE SMALLS,
CHARLES CAMPBELL,
ANTONIO ROSARIO,
HILTON VEGA,
YONG XIN HUANG,
FRANKIE ARZUEGA,
MALCOLM FERGUSON,
YVONNE SMALLWOOD,
and so many others who have had their lives ended by the NYPD.
Unlike the major leagues, this pastime was never segregated…
I can’t even find the words to express my disappointment.
The murder of SEAN BELL was clearly a case of drunk cops.
They were drunk on alcohol and drunk from the power that their badge and their automatic weapons endowed them with.
I just don’t have any words to say at this time that would be worth your eyesight. I feel powerless and insignificant.
Supremacy stays winning.