Guest commentary: Chaos and the science of mass criminalization

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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor

In his best-selling and seminal book, “Chaos, Making A New Science,” the brilliant writer James Gleick writes, “Where chaos begin, classical science stops, for as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the law of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuation of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side — these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities.”

In the social sciences, chaos is relegated to academic purgatory; only rebels and fools like Paulo Freire, Rudy Acuna, Cornell West, Noam Chomsky and a handful of others, attempt to seriously look into the maelstrom that is social chaos — the erratic side of orthodoxy. The side that Father Gregory Boyle calls the “edge of the periphery,” where chaos reigns and has been left intentionally in a black hole of fear and ignorance by the cowardly status quo.

But that has never deterred the contemporary defacto “social engineers” and charlatans of social order and safety — you know them: the college professor, the cop, the probation officer, the slick DA, the unscrupulous politician, the grieving and vengeful mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter to violence — from proclaiming their expertise on how to deal with crime (chaos), law and order.  They are all experts at what they think they know about social order, safety and the requisite crime and punishment in a petrified and catatonic world; you add chaos (what makes mankind break bad) into the mix and they know nothing.

Never deterred, pig-headed always, these hypocritical experts blunder blindly with their self-serving agenda, mostly fanning the flames of fear and lies. This how the Tea Party was created by evil hypocritical politicians conspiring to create a spooked critical mass of the American electorate with nothing more than fabricated statistics and crime trends so they can then push their law-and-order monstrosities upon the frightened masses. Their evil genius has succeeded throughout the nation.

Here in Oxnard these law and order monstrosities violate the constitutional rights of many of our most vulnerable citizens — the youth, the poor and the immigrants. The three Civil “Gang” Injunctions, enacted ostensibly to curb gang violence, are a direct assault on the constitutional rights of our youth. These are obscene and monstrous laws that are the current law-and-order playbook of our current crop of fascist politicians that targets Chicano youth in Oxnard, and it will remain in play forever, as there is no sunset clause to these heinous civil gang injunctions. In fact the Civil “Gang” Injunctions enacted in Oxnard were nothing more than obscene, evil and hypocritical ploys by power-hungry politicians who wanted to pimp their tough-on-crime credentials to the local electorate. Local inflammatory politics played out obscenely on the backs of our youth of color. Oxnard still proudly proclaims to the world that if you “spray you pay.” The fine for an individual tagging or graffiti violation is $1,000. We have some kids and their parents now shackled with tens of thousands of dollars in fines; they will never be able to pay they, so some will go jail, the youth violator or the parent. This is how the wheel of justice is greased in Oxnard by the blood, sweat, tears and money of the disenfranchised.

In Oxnard, avoiding being sucked up by the far-reaching tentacles of the civil gang injunctions is today a pathetic litmus test, a sick and warped rite of passage for many of our youth in the community with regards to their street sense and capability to maneuver and avoid the draconian conditions of this unjust and highly punitive policy that creates a new class of youthful criminals for crimes that they “may” perpetrate. In Oxnard if you “front” a certain look (think cholo), you are now guilty until proven innocent!

And if that was not enough, the Oxnard cops now jack cars from immigrants, and then exact incredibly high fines, making the recovery of the vehicles impossible for most immigrants, all in the name of public safety. The cops harass many of the immigrants, youth and down-on-their-luck folks riding toward a better tomorrow on bicycles because they have violated some obscure traffic law that the cops interpret to their immediate omnipotent proclivity. Ignorance of the law in Oxnard is no excuse, except for the privileged and powerful. While the Oxnard Police Department has denied collusion with ICE, it has been reported to me by various reliable community sources that immigrants continued to be targeted, arrested and processed.

The easiest targets, the cart vendor, the campesino, the family that has been reported to ICE, are being terrorized, arrested and taken away. This is local ICE in action, at a time when the federal government is attempting to reconcile the immigration nightmare with a promise of empathy and legal remedies for the undocumented.

Father Gregory Boyle’s wise and timeless admonition to those who wish to work with often dysfunctional, powerless and troubled folk perfectly describes grappling with the effects and causation of chaos. Boyle warns, “A simple diagnosis for complicated human aliments invariably results in simple and erroneous treatment.”

Oxnard officials pretend that they want to help the dysfunctional and troubled youth or help the newly-arrived and vulnerable immigrants, but these are lies; because the monstrosity of their local public law and order paradigm is an initial and monstrous misdiagnosis of mass deception created by fabricated statistics, fear, and lies. The local politicians and the status quo that keeps both of these groups safe, isolated and insolated, does not care to integrate or empathize, let alone take on and treat the complicated and long term needs of the disenfranchised, powerless, afflicted and needy; they cares only to retain power and control, by any means necessary, so they lie and fabricate crime, and impose laws to keep the local residents in chains.

This then is the pathetic state of affairs that we find ourselves again in Oxnard. A perpetual re-tooling and amping-up of our local monstrous law and order police machine directed against the most vulnerable and powerless of our citizens. This assault is lead by the greed and hypocrisy of the local power mongers that rule with lies, hypocrisy, fear and intimidation and are of course supported mindlessly by the gullible and frightened masses.

I suspect that we could take any town in America and readily discern that simple minded disingenuous functionaries and crooked politicians enacted hypocritical and simple minded policing and safety policies to control the social chaos that swirls mysteriously, suspiciously, and menacingly around them. Politicians run for office because they want to put law and order into political play; it is a silly game to them, and they love it, telling the youth, the disenfranchised, the powerless, the law breakers to get right, get out of town, or go to jail. The more monstrous and ill conceived the safety policy is the greater the support from the local constituency, it is as predictable as it is dangerous and disingenuous. We need and want the police; they never lie, they are here to protect and serve is the pathetic refrain of the evil politician and the inoculated electorate. Ignorance and lies as law and order policy rule the day and they are all based on fabricated lies and promulgated by fear.

That is what we have in Oxnard where vile and disingenuous men institute draconian law and order policy in a futile attempt to rein in the social chaos they do not care to understand. Unlike the physicist and scientist who are now looking into the cause and effect of chaos; an even cursory examination reveals that chaos is everywhere, because as Gleick states, ”Chaos breaks across the lines that use to separate scientific disciplines. Because it is the science of the global nature of systems, chaos has brought together scientist and thinkers from fields that had been historically separated.”

Unlike physicist and scientist, the local government officials and social order functionaries are terrified by the unknown, by chaos; and so they have been left behind in their evil, destructive, and ignorant darkness. So these politicians are shielded and equipped with the hypocritical lies of the law and order policies they hastily enact. It is the only thing they know to keep chaos (everyone other than them) at bay, their failed and discredited tough on hard on crime credentials to the electorate.

The ruling class is blind to the chaos in Oxnard that swaggers and stumbles, mad dogs and shouts; it etches and tags Armageddon revolt on the pristine walls of the trembling elite. The ruling class is in perpetual fear, fearing they will lose their power and control, so they unleash their laws and their cops. The community is in bondage, acts of revolt and resistance are dealt with swiftly; the status quo responds with deadly police force. Chaos must and will be controlled at any cost. In recent days we have seem and felt the failed and hypocritical Oxnard community law and safety policy and how it responses to white collar conspiracy and crime; with a pathetic slap on the wrists to the crooked and loathsome local government offenders (no jail time for any of the local political offenders); yet they will not hesitate to unleash their brutality and death upon some of our troubled youth and hapless immigrants.

If indeed all politics is local, then vigilance of the democratic process is mandatory least the light and transparency of democracy is extinguished by those powerful forces of despotism, hypocrisy and tyranny. It has been said time and again that democracies don’t fall because of the deeds of evil men but rather because of the inaction of good people. I am afraid that that is exactly what is happening in Oxnard today where we are witnessing the destruction of the democratic process by greedy, hypocritical, evil powerful men who have completely lost their way. These men are egomaniacs that serve only their immediate self-interest and will do anything to stay in power; so they use their evil tools of intimidation, bullying and incarceration for anyone that stands in their way.

We must stand up to the forces of evil and repression that enslave our community. We are the chaos they fear and we are evey where, united we will prevail.

— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., is the executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.