Relations.

Editor,

Authoritarianism means you as a high school kid or anybody else are obliged to submit with unquestioning and absolute obedience to authority. And unquestioning, absolute obedience to authority is what American police are trained to demand. Nonnegotiable submission. Like in East Germany or the USSR. Or on a plantation in the antebellum South.

This is why Rodney King was stomped and beaten until he finally was incapable of moving any part of his body. It is why "resisting arrest" is the go-to charge for which Sandra Bland and hundreds of thousands of others are tackled, shackled, and locked in a cage. No negotiation. No recognition, acknowledgement, or respect for anyone's perception of an interaction besides authority's.

Works great if you don't want any uppity assertive types around who are not rich enough to qualify for deference by the ruling class's thugs.

Almost weekly here in Canada I read about an hours-long stand-off in which police negotiators convince a subject who has locked himself in his house to surrender peacefully. Americans have invested trillions in technologies to shoot, bomb, torture, and kill people who will not submit to their will and apparently nothing in learning how to deescalate conflict and communicate with human beings.

Unquestioning and absolute obedience to authority. How American corporations do business, how American police keep the peace, and how American culture understands societal relations.

Re: "Justice Department to Investigate Officer’s Flipping of High School Student" (10/28/2015)