The Violence of Thoughts and Prayers
A diatribe on a three-word phrase interconnected with a nation’s infuriating malaise.
Content/Trigger Warning: Discussions of Death and Violence
The United States of America was built upon a foundation of violence; *more broadly, the empires of Europe were. Violence against millions of Native and Indigenous populations. Violence against millions of Black populations brought to the continent and enslaved against their will. The violence of rape was a constant reality. There’s a reason why so many Black and Native people have ‘fair’ complexions. In modernity, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has been escalating for decades. The prison system is overrepresented with non-White populations. Violent eugenicist policy has shaped the reproductive rights of Black and Native women for centuries. When the Chinese were exploited for their labor to enter the country in the 1800s, they experienced similar violences and were even expelled from the country until legislation passed in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s which allowed their reentry.
Puritanical patriarchal violence was the foundation of the United States and came with the bibles of the colonizers. White women were not unscathed; race did not shield or protect them. Witch Trials, Asylums, Domestic Violence, and for poorer White women sterilization. The intersections of class and race have frequently clashed in the United States and are often used as a buttress toward any long-lasting progress for solidarity against the power structures of violence, domination, and capitalism baked into the Constitution and broader punitive laws of the nation. Violent war campaigns of the United States have frequently had racism and the proliferation of racist underpinnings interwoven into its justification…or the greed for expansion which cannot exist without violence. Conflict has filled the coffers of the military-industrial complex for centuries. The fight to keep Black people enslaved for capitalist gain, countless wars with Native Americans for land and resources, wars to keep Mexicans and other Latin Americans out (but desired goods in), territories of the Caribbean, colonies in the Pacific, and campaigns for Middle Eastern oil have kept the wheels greased for more violence to be meted out to anyone who dares oppose the authority of the United States.
Anyone is the Black Panther Party who were surveilled, infiltrated, and almost all summarily killed or jailed. Anyone were those who had bombs from police helicopters dropped on them in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the infamous MOVE bombing. Anyone were radical thinkers like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Anyone(s) were not just political movements but regular citizens who attempted to have homes, liberty, and freedom after the Civil War but frequently faced expulsion and violence, e.g., Tulsa, Lake Lanier, Rosewood, Wilmington, Colfax, and many many more. Anyone(s) were the last of stolen kingdoms like Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii who navigated sugar barons, American presidents, and the United States military before being overthrown and the nation carved up to further the advantages of the United States naval fleets, e.g., Pearl Harbor and 13 other military bases spread across the islands. Anyone(s) are numerous union, labor, and workers' rights movements that constantly faced police violence and had the seeds of xenophobia and racist discord enflamed amongst their participants.
Violence is the frequent response to anyone who dares to rock the status quo in the United States. The fight for abortive services, the fight for the right to vote (along sex and racial lines), the fight for equal access to schools, the fight for equitable and disability entrances and services, the fight to recognize the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, the fight against polluting (of dwellings, people, and the environment). The United States is constantly fighting and at war with its own citizens for basic moral and civil rights and the implementation of police (and the military) to quell these surges of protests are its greatest asset to keep its citizens quiet, compliant, and frightened. Black Americans have an intimate knowledge of the history of policing and their initial purpose as slave patrols that ensured ‘the property’ of White slave owners stayed bound to the land and the broader United States multi-billion dollar capitalistic interest. The swirling nexus of White landowners and slave patrols, post-emancipation became the police and Ku Klux Klan, which frequently overlapped as institutions of racial terror and ‘law enforcement’.
Violence is not always disseminated with bloodshed in the United States but most commonly appears in the way its most vulnerable citizens are terrorized, criminalized, or dehumanized. The houseless, the elderly, women, children, gay and trans people, the working poor, and the disabled/immunocompromised are in the repetitive crosshairs of politics, violent bigots, the medical industry, and any others that wield a modicum of power in this White supremacist capitalist sexist patriarchy. Unhealthy masculinities have riddled holes in the souls of the populace — not just boys and men — but everyone that reproduces the violent aggression of upholding ‘maleness as default’ and belittling of femininity or gentility. The disempowered or powerless frequently utilize the tools of the powerful to enact violence against each other in this nation. Landlords and legislators keeping people from accessing affordable housing, monetary or physical abuse against the elderly, control and domination of women, the disinvestment of food and opportunity from children, gay and trans people who are legislated against-assaulted-or murdered, the poor who are kept cyclically poor, and the disabled/immunocompromised who are constantly fighting for the right to live. An umbrella of violent inhumanity casts its shadow for millions across the United States.
Violence is displacement in the United States, frequently by forced removal or gentrification, but now more than ever it’s a byproduct of climate-related disasters. The escalated frequency of tornados, hurricanes, snowstorms, and floods means that citizens are annually in crisis preparation mode for food, electricity, heat, and housing in case of evacuation. The horror of Hurricane Katrina not only exposed the faces of displacement/disinvestment but the United States' laissez-faire attitude to infrastructure. The tragic partial building collapse of Champlain Towers in Miami remains symbolic of the ticking clock for the lifespan of many American buildings. Bridges, roads, levees, subway systems, and other vital components of our thoroughfare systems are beginning to show their age and their propensity for disaster. The deadly subzero freeze of Texas (which still has not received a proper criminal investigation or restorative justice) and the monsoon-like floods where people drowned or were sucked out of their homes in New York City were akin to scenes from science-apocalypse movies but were far more terrifying than any CGI blockbuster. Lest we forget, that production at all costs styles of capitalism and the need for tireless automatons during tornados led to the deaths, injuries, and traumatization of workers in the Mayfield, Kentucky candle factory and Edwardsville, Illinois Amazon warehouse who were not allowed to leave for risk of being fired.
Violence is baked into our response to health crises. The aforementioned AIDS virus (with its layered stigma surrounding sexual orientation and race), infant mortality rates for Black mothers, the racial politics of polio, syphilis, and the pandemic of our time: COVID-19, which has killed a minimum of one million people and counting. No one was left unscathed from this virus but the inequities were felt dramatically, once again, for the most vulnerable…children, the elderly, the disabled/immunocompromised, the working poor, Black-Native-and Latine populations…many of whom listed have overlap.
This pandemic exposed many of the vulnerabilities of being folded into Americana, such as less fear or empathy amongst the white population as Black-Native-and Latine deaths outpaced their own…or the inequalities of access/unaffordability for medical care baked into the United States as a nation but most prominently for vulnerable racial and immune sensitive groups.
Even as numbers ticked into the hundreds of thousands regarding deaths (and millions with undiagnosed long-COVID) there was a blip of half-mast flags, church bells, and a tear of grief all before there was an aggressive push for ‘normalcy’ for the economy. The numbers are being manipulated — downplayed, tracking is near non-existent, faces of the dead and long-COVID are being obscured or uncatalogued but it was of greatest import that corporations inflated prices and siphoned billions of dollars in profits in the interim. Millions of lives have been devastated, thousands of children have been orphaned, and millions are wading in a sea of grief and PTSD but the violence of normal was most important to return to.
Gas prices, food items, and rent have ballooned. Many have to decide which is more essential to sustain long-term: food to eat, gas for transportation, or a place to live. This constant state of anxiety is unhealthy for the population and the response from well-established politicians is lackadaisical at least and callous at worst. All the while disinvestment from the police never stopped; it’s actually receiving new funding (i.e., guns, surveillance, militarized vehicles) and resource distribution that directly impacts the lives of the American citizenry. Moreover, as the zeal for ‘normal’ gripped (some of) the populace, mass shootings returned with a vengeance…many of which were racially or religiously targeted and in the case of Uvalde, Texas directed towards children (and teachers).
Once again, the same parroting of condolences and refrain of thoughts and prayers emerges from social media statements, press releases, state, and national addresses. No action, just thoughts. No change, just prayers. For many, this three-word sentence is all they’ll ever receive (besides the whirlwind of the news circuit to document their immediate sorrow followed by an abrupt departure). Thoughts and prayers have become a canned cliché phraseology that lost its meaning from the first moment it was spoken or placed in print because the United States has never looked inward — only outward — as its documented centuries of bloodshed, genocide, and disregard for its citizens has gone unchecked and unpunished. THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS IS NOT A NORMAL RESPONSE TO CEASELESS TRAUMA AND DEATH, it is violent and we as a nation have been repeatedly violated. We know it’s empty, we know it’s regurgitated, and we know it’s all we’ll ever be compensated.
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