After going through my shelves on Goodreads, I have 88 books that I did not finish, and I’m still thinking about most of them.
On my homepage I see the activity of a user I follow. “Alok V. Menon rated 4/5 stars, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv.”
Begrudgingly, I click “Want to Read” because I am a daughter, and child-free at 42, I’m slowly getting around to a better understanding of my mother’s idea of love as service and sacrifice while learning to accept the complicated individuals we both are.
I wonder who this Rachel Aviv is and if she’s really got the sensibilities to yield a compelling, perspective-shaping work. I scroll down to her bio, and–of course she does. She’s prolific and award-winning.
What’s more, she covered something important in my locality that I had somehow missed. As I read it, I saw how this isn’t just Albuquerque’s problem from fifteen years ago – it’s America’s problem today.
I can’t get to the original New Yorker post, but this annotated version is pretty cool. Even when some of the questions feel asinine, I appreciate what this Harvard blog was trying to do. “Annotation Tuesday! Rachel Aviv and “Your Son Is Deceased” – Nieman Storyboard.” Aviv shared her motivations and methods, handling this upsetting story of wanton police corruption with the clear sight of empathy. After reading it, I’m sold on her latest book.
“Your Son Is Deceased” is about “a police department awash in machismo” – how the Albuquerque PD has been riddled with incompetence at the individual and structural level. What is “machismo” if not the attitude of a man who masks his shame with righteous aggression?
A brief AI query suggests that things really haven’t changed since the story was published.
The only two officers ever criminally charged for killing mentally ill civilians experienced no further consequences because of a mistrial. “Hundreds of police killings. Two prosecutions. No jail time. | Searchlight New Mexico.” Civil suits have been more successful at wringing justice out of this institution.
Until a few weeks ago, I thought I had it pretty good living in this blue state. Thanks to progressive activism, that’s partly true; I’m not starving, sick, or under constant threat of violence despite being technically homeless. But then… https://alisav.substack.com/p/the-new-mexico-epstein-truth-commission. The author of this piece had to leave the country because she was targeted for harassment and even assault with a microwave-emitting device. Corruption is so entrenched in this state that it couldn’t tolerate this one person shining a light into it. Alisa Valdes Rodriguez, The Pugilist, barely had the resources to get her family and pets out of the country.
Imagine the plight of the people described by Silver City police academy director Gilbert Najar, from when he served with the APD:
‘The department “did policing one way in the South Valley, where there were a lot of immigrant families and people of lower socioeconomic status, and we knew we could violate their rights. But we did not dare commit those tactics in the affluent neighborhoods, where we knew they would file complaints on us.”’
It’s worthwhile to do what one can to stop police from violating anyone’s rights.
Abolishing police and prisons is still looked at as “fringe” from the whiter parts of the left, but I think that’s as much of a knee-jerk reaction as wondering whether we even need these institutions at all. If we’re all together on trying to be less barbaric, we certainly don’t need them in their current malignant form – cops acting like crooks with impunity, prisons presenting as slavery 2.0 – but “reform” is always too little too late.
As I was horrified to learn several months ago, police weren’t accountable to the murders of three children in Castle Rock, CO, in 1999 – even though they were bound by Colorado law to enforce the restraining order against the man who murdered his young daughters. Police did nothing, and when the mother sought justice, the Supreme Court was like: Nah.
In a sane world, the tragedy that led to Castle Rock v. Gonzalez would never have happened. What does it say about the sanity of this world that not only was it brushed off by the SCOTUS, but that cops are still at large and in charge?
Anyway. The books I started and haven’t finished that plague my thoughts most right now are:
- Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger by Lama Rod Owens
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
- The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- Persistent Progressives: The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union by John F. Freeman
I mean to finish all of these, but the last one I want to pair with a book I haven’t bought yet and really have no business reading: First Generation Farming by Chris Newman – you might have seen him on YouTube. Rethinking our agriculture seems as pressing as rethinking our law enforcement systems.
BLOG OF RHIANNIMATOR 