When I was in high school, I had a curfew. I had to be home by 9:30 on school nights, 11 on weekends. This curfew was imposed by my parents. And I didn't always like it, but I did understand it.
After all, the people who had given me this deadline were responsible for me. It was their job to protect me as best they could, to try and raise me right, to set me up for success, to teach me that actions have consequences and that, as a minor, my life was not fully mine. It was their responsibility to raise me to be respectful, polite, and kind, it was their job to help me become a good person.
Whenever I broke curfew, I was grounded and given extra chores or yard work. And whenever I didn't, I would come home to see my mom's tired smile as she turned off the front porch lights and walked up the stairs to bed. My point is: I didn't always like the rules set for me, but I always knew that my parents were only trying to protect me the best way they knew how.
Now, I'm under a different kind of curfew. This one is set by my city's mayor and enforced by their police officers, and it is anything but fair. Where my parents made rules to help keep me safe, my city has made them just to silence me. To silence all of us.
Because by setting up a curfew, cops are justified to beat the shit out of protestors as soon as the clock hits 8 PM. By putting a limit on its citizens, the city is taking away our rights and giving itself the right to arrest people fighting against injustice. By making it law that everyone must be inside while it's still light out, those in power get to continue to exert their control over us. They have given themselves legal justification for continued brutality and oppression.
So now, not only are cops kneeling on a father's neck for nearly nine minutes, or murdering an unarmed EMT while she slept, or shooting a man in the back because he fell asleep at a Wendy's drive-thru, or committing the hundreds of other racially charged murders that have occurred in the last few decades while still claiming they were just doing their job-- not only are cops getting away with taking lives time and time again, but now they're justifying the mass silencing of people who are exerting their legal right to free speech. Now they're beating college kids to a pulp and then charging them with assault. Now they're firing tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of peaceful protestors, committing war crimes in the name of 'national security.' Now they're shaking hands with armed members of white power vigilante groups and then turning around and pulling off kids' glasses and masks to pepper spray them in the face. Now our city's mayor is 'praising protestor's actions' while allowing racist statues to remain and pretending not to see flagrant police brutality happening every single day and hoping we don't notice that he hasn't cut the police department's funding at all. Now our country's president is egging on the violence and calling people thugs for marching for equality and justice, and now our city is welcoming the National Guard in to patrol the streets. Now innocent people are being killed for the color of their skin, and peaceful people protesting those murders are being arrested, and cops can use their nightsticks on anyone out after 8 fucking PM.
We're under curfew for the protection of the people in power's desire to return things to status quo. We're under curfew so more unarmed black men and women and children can be assassinated by the police. We're under curfew to silence those who fight for what's right and to punish those who dare speak the truth.
We all had a curfews in high school to keep us safe. And if we broke them, we'd get extra chores or a grounding or a slap on the head.
But now we're anything but safe. And now if we break curfew, we'll get beaten bloody and locked in a cell.
They will continue trying to silence us.
Don't let them.
