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I am about to watch the soccer game on TV with my mother by my side, and she asks me: «Why are those players taking a knee?».
And I reply that more or less a year ago in the United States, some white policemen killed another black citizen, and that gesture of kneeling should make those who want to understand realize that racism didn't end when slavery was abolished, and we still have to deal with it, in the United States and elsewhere too.
«Good for them!» she exclaims.
I don't know if it really does anything, taking a knee – I think – but it’s like turning on a light, illuminating one to attempt to bring justice to the hundreds of victims left in the shadows.
A bit like what the AK-47 did at the beginning of 1980.
They should be a punk band from Houston, Texas, because they tell a story that happened in Houston and more or less sound like a punk band.
The conditional is necessary with AK-47.
They record a single and literally disappear from circulation, besides a few fleeting appearances at some Houston venues.
The local police place a bounty on them of one million dollars, how much a million dollars from 1980 would be today, I have no idea.
In form, it’s not a bounty but a legal case.
Then, the risk that there might be some zealous officer willing to pull out the revolver and do summary justice to those bastards, who can exclude it?
In essence, that one-million-dollar legal case is a bounty.
No one knows who played that single, who recorded it, who produced it, and least of all who distributed it.
The story of the AK-47 is already over.
But that single, somehow, passes from hand to hand, and a few people learn about the story of Milton Glover.
Which is the same as Joe Campos Torres, Reggie Lee Jackson, Janice Ray, and the others whose names are printed on the cover of that single.
Victims, colon, and a litany of names.
Victims of the Houston police force.
The ones who are prominently displayed in war gear on that same cover, and then the motto of which they are proud: «The badge means you care», the badge means you care.
Those bastards taint it: «The badge means you suck», the badge means you’re a worm.
Maybe the million-dollar bounty is for this, maybe it's for having sung about Milton Glover's story in a single.
Who is a black citizen, who serves the homeland by fighting a long war in Vietnam, and from there returns with many problems, physical and mental.
He convinces himself that only God can help him, he talks to Him continuously, hoping to find some relief, and to always have Him close, he chooses as an inseparable companion a Bible, knows some verses by heart, and happens to recite them on the street, and someone from time to time stops to exchange a word with him.
Years ago, someone like Milton would have been affectionately called the town fool, today I don't know.
The fact is that one evening Milton is returning to his home when a beam of light hits him, and he sees two men in uniform in front of him.
No one knows what they say to him and what runs through his mind, only that Milton puts his hand in his pocket to take out the Bible, maybe he wants to recite a verse to those two who have stood in front of him, or maybe he's looking for protection.
They mistake the Bible for a gun and riddled him with bullets.
«The Badge Means You Suck» is all here.
Who knows how it becomes a small anthem of American punk, and when Jello Biafra decides it’s time to find a suitable cover for the Dead Kennedys’ debut, that AK-47 song buzzes ceaselessly in his head, just as when he decides it’s time to revisit «I Fought the Law».
The single was reissued last year, forty years after its release, and all proceeds from sales are destined for a legal organization committed to the fight for racial justice, and having to still pair the words “race” and “justice” hints at the infinite human misery.
The story is also told in every detail, names and faces, no conditional.
It's likely that at this point the one-million-dollar bounty won’t be collected by anyone anymore.
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