Guest post today by my friend Jamila Levasseur, seen here testifying in favor of divestment from Israel at the University of Maine Board of Trustees meeting earlier this month. She's an alum of the University of Southern Maine, as am I, but we know each other from standing with the Palestinian resistance, opposing genocide, and waging a "Stop Arming Israel" campaign here in our state.
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT FELONIES
By Jamila Levasseur
“Felon” is not a dirty word.
At least it
shouldn’t be. But lately I’ve been noticing a disturbing new trend in liberal protest
signage. Somebody came up with “F-ELON + FELON” and it’s popping up amidst
other signs at rallies calling out disastrous threats to free speech, cuts to
healthcare and education, environmental regulation rollbacks and firing of
civil service workers.
A “F-ELON +
FELON” sign even showed up at the weekly downtown standout I attend where a
bunch of us gather every week to protest the Israel/U.S. genocide of
Palestinian people. We’ve been doing this since October 2023. Some of us wave
Palestinian flags, others carry messages intended to remind folks that guided
missile systems made right here in Maine along with our tax dollars and
complacency are responsible for incinerating entire families in Gaza.
What’s with
these FELON signs? Is this someone’s idea of clever?
The
staggering rate of felony convictions is the result of our profit-driven
industry of mass incarceration, systemic racism, crippling poverty in a country
run on capitalist greed, draconian drug laws, and a host of other factors. None
of this should be surprising. For too long we’ve been mostly passive, while
oligarchs from the two major political parties drag us into further decline.
Genocide-enabler
Biden was also the architect behind Clinton-era “criminal justice reform” and
therefore responsible for not only the mass carnage in Gaza but the era of mass
incarceration in the U.S. He’s an unindicted war criminal, but he’ll get away with
it and Democrats will line up to buy his sanitized memoir when it hits Amazon’s
warehouse bins.
I’m not plugging Amazon here, quite the contrary. Support your local independent bookstore! There are lots of reasons to boycott Amazon, including the cloud technology it provides to Israel’s military to make apartheid more efficient and deadlier for Palestinians. If that doesn’t bother you, what about Amazon’s abysmal rates of worker injuries in its fast-paced warehouses?
But I
digress.
Trump and
his billionaire buddy Elon are criminals too, and surely there are plenty of
nasty words that could be used to describe them. Surely you can come up with
something more creative than FELON.
When you use
the word FELON pejoratively, it is a slap in the face to every parent who’s got
a child in prison, every son or daughter who only gets to see their mom or dad
in the confines of a stifling visiting room with plastic chairs, vending
machines and patrolling guards, every spouse who waits for that fifteen-minute
monitored phone call to let them know their husband or wife survived another
day of hell. When you use FELON like it
was a dirty word, you are pissing on every person in this country whose felony
conviction limits their career choices, their housing options, their
possibilities of a decent paycheck and maybe their voting rights.
While neither
Democrat nor Republican war criminals will ever see a day behind bars, there
are lots of fine, principled women and men in this country – former political
prisoners with felony convictions – who continue to work every day for an end
to genocide, militarism, racism, poverty and environmental devastation. These are people who paid huge prices to try
and create a better world. They didn’t wait till Trump got elected to get out
there with protest signs. They continue to hit the streets, to educate, to
organize.
So please,
stop using FELON as a dirty word.
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