Author Archives: erick

On August 26th, 2016, I was scrolling blank-minded through Twitter on my iPhone when a tweet caught my eye. I scrolled past it initially, but back tracked when I recognized the word “Chicago” in a tweet authored by ex-Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade. Was D-Wade hyped to replace real-life Mr. Glass, Derrick Rose, starting for the Chicago Bulls this season? I had to know his opinion on how good my favorite basketball team was finally going to be. Alas, no. However, as I read the tweet I got equally, if not more passionate, as I would have for the latter situation. The tweet said this: “My cousin was killed today in Chicago. Another act of senseless gun-violence. 4 kids lost their mom for NO REASON.” As it turns out, Nykea Aldridge was walking her baby in a stroller when she got caught in some crossfire. She was not the intended victim. Two brothers were arrested for her murder, and confessed to attempting to murder a rival gang member. Turns out (this is not even a surprise to me, and I grew up in the 1600s) the homicide rate in Chicago is high, and has been for a long time. 511 is the total homicide count so far this year, according to the Chicago Tribune, already 20 more than the total number of homicides in 2015, and it’s only September. The murder rate may have peaked at 943 in 1992, but the overall gun violence and general crime rates in Chicago have been on the rise in recent years, and this year happens to be the highest since 1992, after a long trend upwards starting, suspiciously, in 2011, when Rahm Emanuel took office.

I’m not here today to talk about guns laws in Illinois or how bad of a mayor Rahm Emaneul is (wait, yes I am), though both of those things I would qualify as deserving of public discourse. I want to propose that the historically high crime rate in Chicago is violating the citizens of Chicago’s natural right to life, liberty, and even property in a more roundabout way. A typical citizen of Chicago may not have to worry about their safety on a regular day-to-day basis, that is if they stick to safer neighborhoods and certain more well lit parks after dark. One would assume the Dwayne Wade, who grew up in the Chi before abandoning all of Illinois for Miami, would have a cousin who would qualify as a typical citizen of Chicago. The fact that Nykea Aldridge’s murder was motivated by a gang rivalry which she had nothing to do with qualifies this as a problem which effects the entire general public of Chicago, thus effecting their right not only to life, but also the liberty to just take your newborn child on a stroll with you, or whatever you happen to want to do on the public streets of Chicago. This problem also effects people’s liberty to live wherever they want. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, each with their own unique identity, culture, and demographics. Generally people live in the neighborhood most suited to their background because of the enjoyment which comes from having a close-knit community inside a city of millions. This is a liberty which I consider everyone as being born with: to live where they choose. As well, certain neighborhoods tend to have less expensive property than others, however those neighborhoods also tend to have much higher crime rates. In fact, it’s directly related. If people cannot feel safe living where they must live then this also infringes on a person’s right to liberty.

Murder is already illegal, though. So what would the solution to this problem be? Normally I would say that naturally murder is a crime which would be punished by the government which it happens under and then the public would in tern be deterred from doing that crime. It seems though, in the case of Chicago, either the government is not doing an adequate job of punishing this crime and thus deterring the public from it, and thus the punishment for certain crimes in Chicago should be raised in severity, or the government is not taking enough preliminary steps to stop the crime in the first place. Policy already exists on both ends of this. Either way, however, the problem is that the government is not trying hard enough to enforce policy already in place to protect its people and I suggest that government (I’m talkin @ you Rahm) has become tyrannical and thus deserves to be reset through revolution.

http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/homicides

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/28/us/chicago-dwyane-wade-cousin-nykea-aldridge-killed/

Ever since I was born, sometime in like the 15th century, my favorite neighborhood in Austin, Texas has always been the lower Eastside. Though there is no factual evidence to confirm this, and historically speaking I probably feel the opposite, I just love the culture there! The Eastside has always been the most diverse place in Austin since I officially moved here in 2001, when I was like 400 y/o. However, I’ve noticed that change in recent years. I just need to set up a brief history of my experiences, however, before I begin this: turns out, I moved to the U.S. during the civil war, and then witnessed the entire history of racism and the systematic oppression of minorities in the U.S. including things like “The 1928 Master Plan” which served to move all the PoC population in Austin to the Eastside. Therefore, I believe that class-lines and race-lines often line up.

So, what I’m saying is that this gentrification taking place in East Austin is a matter of public discourse because it does not promote the protection of the life, liberty, and especially property, of the people of East Austin. Now, I’ve been around for a long time, obviously, so I know I blew up around the time that guy Thomas Jefferson sampled some of my works in his. However, I will remind everyone of my core principle: that everyone, regardless of class, race, gender has a right to Life, Liberty, and Property. I also have this thing about what should and should not be argued publicly and I’d like to say that the happenings on the Eastside deserve a public discourse, and maybe even an overdue peoples revolution!

There’s one specific incidence I want to discuss which I read about in The Austin Chronicle, a news source which embodies everything I, John Locke, love about my city (Go Riverbats!). The Chronicle argues that gentrification works to make real-estate developers extremely aggressive in certain neighborhoods. As a result of all of the revamping and construction which will then take place in a neighborhood deemed hot by developers, generally people of lower-socioeconomic class levels are forced to move out when the rent or property taxes go up due to all the commerce brought about by the new development. This in its self does not deserve to be the topic of public discourse. No one is dying, no one is necessarily stealing or illegally obtaining property, and the liberty to live wherever you want still exists as long as you can pay it. However, there is one particular case which took place in February of 2015 which deserve a public discourse: the destruction of my favorite piñata shop by F&F Real Estate Ventures. According to the Austin Chronicle the family owned shop was destroyed without any prior notice to the family, in order to make way for some SXSW infrastructure. This violates this family’s right to property! The fact that the Chronicle reports that all of this was done legally only strengthens my argument that this deserve a public discourse.

In fact, I think a lot of these racially charged issues deserve to be topic of public discourse on account of historical context:

I always say that government only exists with the peoples consent, and they make laws which are supposed to be rationality embodied. So that’s the very first problem we have to deal with here before we move on. I believe one racial issue, over all other issues, should not be a topic of public discourse, but instead a topic of revolution by the people. As I said before, I witnessed the civil war, and therefore I know that PoC are no longer regarded as slaves in the U.S. However, the U.S. government was established before the civil war, and therefore does not exist by the consent of all of the freed slaves who after the civil war began to live within that government. This in it self calls for a complete over throw of the government by all ex-slaves after the civil war, which we know never happened. The closest we came was Reconstruction, which was run by people who were not elected with the consent of most freed men. Laws began to crop up after the civil war then, which were not rational, such as laws limiting freed-men’s ability to give their consent to the U.S. government in the way that the U.S. government was set up to allow people to give their consent (Jim Crow). Political Society absolutely requires the consent of the governed to exist and it has never been given to an extent which satisfies me.

Some haters may say that I have also argued that governments may act on the consent of the majority, because gaining the consent of the whole is nearly impossible, and the majority of people did vote for ALL of this to happen. However, I argue that the racism felt by the majority of people in the U.S. was NOT a matter of public discourse in the first place and therefore should not have ever been discussed by the government and should definitely not have been included in any kind of policy.Legislation should only be made of issues that are public discourse.  These laws which promoted segregation and oppression were also tyrannical in the first place because they acted against the protection of the liberty, and property of PoC, as well as latently promoted the general public to act towards taking the right to life away.

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