The 1984 Olympics being held in Los Angeles was used as justification for one of the earliest militarizations of modern police departments, with massive gang sweeps leading up to the event, where many known gang members were rounded up and jailed on various charges that could've been enforced at any point. One should always remember existence can always be deemed illegal, because there's enough laws on the books that any of us can get put in jail should a police state choose to enforce what it wants to enforce. For African-Americans and norteno Latinos, this meant jail at the time, but for many immigrant communities, this meant known gang members (which means they were on gang task force lists, not necessarily known in any other capacity, basically a list police made) got deported back to wherever their family was from, despite many of the alleged gang members not having ever known the place.
For central Americans, this was a huge issue, because a lot of refugees of civil wars and unstable states in those nations, caused by direct and covert US interference, relocated to Southern California, where they found a gang culture that required organizing their own protective gangs. This manufactured new gang members, who were exported back to the native nations of their parents, where gang networks connected tendrils. This also imported the gang problem seen in El Salvador and Honduras from the US to central America, which - thirty-some years later - has become the justification of some alleged invasion of criminal elements which requires giant walls and militarized police forces working covertly in various American cities. The whole thing has been this self-perpetuating cycle that has ultimately depended on the dehumanization of minorities. And in fact, a lot of what is really fucked up about America right now was initiated during the Reagan era.
I find all this interesting because none of this is new, but we have been trained to have such a micro-focus, probably by design because if we have a micro-focus, we are always excited by what's new, instead of content with what already is in our possession. Capitalist economy requires constant dopamine rush of newness. Unfortunately in terms of larger critical thinking, this sort of destroys our ability to see longer term patterns, and instead we focus on the immediate - that somehow Trump is an anomaly that has upset America's prestige, when in actuality he's just a less PR-savvy version of what's been going on constantly for a while.
Police militarization has only gotten stronger since 1984, with surplus weaponry from constant wars, not to mention police just straight up being down with purchasing military style shit, all of which is justified by a war on mysterious terror. What happened in LA in 1984 helped lay the tinder in the metaphysical environment that exploded in the '92 riots, because Rodney King getting beat by the LAPD was not shocking to a lot of residents, nor was the cops getting acquitted. But it was too much to have it all out in the open like that, without giving a fuck. Essentially that's why bourgeois have a problem with Trump era America, is that it's just out in the open without giving a fuck. But Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama all escalated these federal executive powers pretty steadily, without any thought that it could go wrong. They didn't care. They imagined the sustainable growth of executive privilege with no repercussions. Obama had pretty great PR skills, so it's been a big hangover to drop to Trump, but it's really not all that different in terms of what's being done, just the corruption is more open and doesn't give a fuck. More metaphysical tinder is being scattered.
If you are excited by that tinder, and look forward to an explosion, I hope you realize how many of these people out here support the militarization of the police, without question, and have militarized themselves to a large extent. These people don't give a fuck, and when the explosion happens (which it will), I hope people are ready for what that entails. It's gonna be some ugly things happening, and you can't unexperience what you experience. And not everybody can afford therapy either.
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