Nothing will change until a majority of the population has experienced hardship. Gun violence, police brutality, homelessness, poverty (and by extension, wage slavery, and lack of healthcare and education): these are all related, not only in regard to this theme, but one cannot be fixed without the others.
We work in order to (attempt to) avoid poverty and, therefore, homelessness. The police contribute by enforcing laws, which criminalize homelessness and, therefore, poverty. Certain groups of people have been impoverished by systemic forces for generations and, therefore, criminalized, yet progress in fixing this issue has been slow and not without opposition from those who benefit from the status quo.
Those few, who’ve inherited the nation’s wealth, are able to buy politicians who propose and enact the laws that police uphold. In turn, those same groups of people are subject to poverty, by having their wealth stolen by those who undercut their labor and profit from the value they produce. Their poverty is criminalized in order to keep them working.
While those groups of people are often still oppressed, those few, who’ve inherited the nation’s wealth, began, long ago, to expand those groups to include everyone but themselves. Notice how quickly attention to poverty (wage slavery and stagnation, unaffordable housing and healthcare) has skyrocketed now that so many of us have experienced it.
For reasons of the time, our forefathers ensured us the right to bear arms. Firearms have always been fairly accessible in this country. As the world’s supposed police force, we never lack for military tech either. As people with access to guns get desperate, they’re more likely to use them. Obviously, this is, what some may consider, a dick move, not to mention criminal, heinous even. Many seem to agree that such violence should be met with equal violence, via the same police who patrol our streets and enforce laws against the poverty that is forced upon us by people in higher positions, whether paid, lobbied or simply the heir to a large corporation with a monetary interest in keeping us at work.
As long as we have a slum to raise our children in, safe from the dangers of a nation where poverty is seen as criminal and people are desperate enough to shoot each other, en masse, then we will work. Never mind how much rent and food have increased. There is nothing we can do about it unless we risk becoming poor and, therefore, criminal, subject to the same brutality we’ve seen enacted on minorities of the past. In avoiding such poverty, we are lucky to see our children grow up to repeat the cycle.
If the police weren’t increasingly militarized, they would pose less of a threat to all of us, which isn’t to say they wouldn’t remain well-armed and dangerous. If poverty poses less of a physical threat, our coercion to work is not as potent. If we were not forced to work in order to avoid crippling poverty and crime, we would have more time, energy and safety to reclaim the wealth and value that has been stolen from us, from our critical infrastructure, from our healthcare and education systems, from our parents and grandparents and, most likely, from our children and their children too, which is why many of us have opted out of having children and creating more meat for the grinder.