I want to call attention to the case of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a Cuban immigrant to the United States. Mr. Aguilera-Mederos was employed as a semi truck driver (for those who use British English, "semi truck" means "lorry"), and was recently sentenced to a 110-year prison term for the deaths of four people in an accident in Colorado in which the brakes on the truck driven by Aguilera-Mederos failed, preventing him from safely stopping. The sentencing was determined in large part by the prosecutor in his trial, a Ms. Kayla Wildeman, who "celebrated the harsh verdict" according to one source. This same Ms. Wildeman reports to a chief deputy district attorney named Trevor Moritzky. Moritzky gave Wildeman a trophy for the harsh sentence handed down, yet Moritzky managed to obtain only a misdemeanor conviction for a Colorado police officer who raped a woman in the back seat of his police car. According to another source, Aguilera-Mederos' case also differs from that of a white motorist in Texas named Ethan Couch, who received only ten years probation at his initial sentencing after he killed four people while speeding and under the influence of alcohol and drugs. His parents were wealthy. (See this also.)
I must say now that while many posts on my blog have condemned white supremacy, I do not believe that all white Americans are evil. There are examples of good men and women who do not believe that they and they alone should rule the earth and that they have the right to treat the rest of us as their slaves or punching bags. However, the prosecution of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos is yet another example of how much of the American "justice" system is corrupted by right-wing white supremacists who seek to use the power of the state to vent their unresolved rage. Not only do these supremacists want to dump that rage on people of color, but they even rage against those of their own people who do not share their monstrous sense of entitlement and their malignant narcissism, as is seen by the murder of two white people and the wounding of a third by Kyle Rittenhouse. It seems that Mr. Rittenhouse took exception to the fact that his victims were standing in solidarity with people of color. Mr. Rittenhouse is, in my book, a pile of human garbage, as is the jury which miscarried justice by acquitting him of murder.
To repeat, the "justice" system in the United States at present is merely the tool of those who are rich and white and who wish to dominate. Therefore, many of the verdicts rendered by that system are actually a miscarriage of justice. Among the victims of that miscarriage of justice, the standard response to that miscarriage over the last several years has consisted of things like mass protests, listening sessions, bumper stickers proclaiming that our lives matter, petitions, and attempts to have conversations about "race". In other words, our strategy has looked much like trying to convert our oppressors by trying to have conversations with them.
But the case of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos has begun to show something different. Aguilera-Mederos was not drunk or intoxicated, and did not willfully and deliberately kill people, but was involved in an accident. (Note to Kayla Wildeman and Trevor Moritzky: go find a dictionary and look up the word "accident." The job of a prosecutor is no place for doofuses.) His sentencing was harsh and unfair. And while there have been protests in response, there has also been something else - something with teeth that can bite. Truckers have begun to boycott Colorado. This boycott has begun to produce results FAST. When you can't get things in a certain state because truckers refuse to make deliveries to your state, you tend to sit up and take notice.
And this is the power of strategic nonviolent resistance when it's done strategically. Effective resistance is NOT protest (at least, not solely or even mainly protest), because protests by themselves do NOT impose coercive costs on an oppressor. Effective resistance is the coordinated, unified withdrawal of economic and political support from an oppressive system. If that withdrawal is done according to a wise strategy, the oppressed can cripple the system which is oppressing them. For effective resistance to have long-term staying power, communities of the oppressed need to build their own self-sufficiency by means of what one writer calls "self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement." This is how one can engage in long-term strikes and boycotts which inflict pain and which strike fear into the heart of anyone who wishes to be an oppressor! For those of us in communities of color, it is this kind of power which we need to build.
Let's see how Mr. Aguilera-Mederos' case goes. If Colorado does not commute his sentence (and fast!), I may post a list of companies which are headquartered in Colorado, so that boycotts can be organized against them.
