In recent days, two headline-grabbing deaths have exposed the fundamental lie at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Despite our Founding Fathers’ recognition of “life” as an unalienable right, the deaths of Summer Taylor and Vanessa Guillen demonstrate the space between our national ideals and the personal realities of too many.
During the Fourth of July weekend, protests continued around the country, further intensifying the spotlight on the systemic hypocrisies and injustices highlighted by recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations and months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In South Dakota, Indigenous land protectors took a stand against President Donald Trump ahead of his speech at the site of the Six Grandfathers, the Lakota Sioux name for the natural rock formation that was destroyed to create Mount Rushmore. In Baltimore, protesters tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor. And tragically, in Seattle, 24-year-old Summer Taylor (they/them) was killed after a car struck them on a closed highway.
As reported by the Associated Press, Taylor was struck on Saturday with one other protester, Diaz Love, who was in serious condition at a Seattle hospital on Sunday. According to the AP, the pair had been participating in a protest on Seattle’s closed I-5 interstate highway when, at around 1:40 a.m. local time, someone drove around a vehicle blockade and sped into the crowd. A coworker at the veterinary clinic where Taylor worked told the Seattle Times that Taylor had been a consistent presence at protests sparked by the death of George Floyd.
Another tragic death also made headlines over the weekend: The family of Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old military enlistee stationed at Fort Hood, confirmed that her remains were discovered in Texas. Reportedly, Guillen had planned to file a sexual harassment complaint against the prime suspect in a case the day after investigators say someone beat her to death with a hammer. Since her disappearance in April, the case has focused fresh attention on how military culture fosters sexual harassment and assault. According to the Battered Women’s Justice Project, nearly 25% of military women who sought health care services through the Veterans’ Administration reported at least one sexual assault while in the service.
The deaths of Taylor and Guillen — unconnected by anything material — are, in fact, related. They come against the backdrop of renewed calls to honor the dignity of Black lives and the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taylor and Guillen are two of the newest tragic stars in a vast constellation of American death. They’re part of a massive tapestry that speaks to our government’s fundamental failure to ensure the first of the “unalienable rights” laid out in the document we were meant to celebrate on Independence Day — the right to life.
We know the Declaration of Independence is full of half-truths and hypocrisies; perhaps the most notable is that we’re meant to believe slave owners actually considered “all men are created equal” to be a “self-evident truth” while they kept people in chains. But it’s this abdication of protecting our supposedly unalienable right to life that I am fixated on after the deaths of Taylor and Guillen, Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Because whether the fatal blow is struck by an agent of the state, a private individual, or some confluence of both, there is blood on the hands of the government that built this world. The United States created the conditions where people die not just from horrific acts of violence, but of violence born of poverty, homelessness, and an inability to access health care.
Summer Taylor took to the streets to protest the deaths of people like Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In doing so, they stood against the ways policing in this nation is not just rooted in racism, but is a manifestation of our racist history, reproducing deadly dehumanization at the ideological core of chattel slavery in this country. If there was no historical epidemic of police killing Black people, a direct contradiction of the Declaration’s promise, would Summer Taylor have been on that freeway at that moment when that car came speeding through?
Guillen, on the other hand, was reportedly preparing to take a stand against the insidious force of sexual violence in the military. She went looking for justice within the ranks of the armed forces, an institution that targets poor young people for recruitment to enforce U.S. imperial might globally. Sexual and physical violence against women happens in far too many contexts; but Guillen was operating within a system designed not just to kill foreign combatants but to reprogram enlistees to embrace a culture of toxic masculinity.
The police and the military are two heads of the same hydra: the death cult of American might. This horrible beast has created the conditions for police to violently criminalize poverty and the military to exploit it for recruitment. It’s the same fiendish force that police in South Dakota brought to life this weekend in their crackdown on Native protesters opposing Trump, an ugly echo of the history of Indigenous suffering that people in Baltimore sought to topple by removing the status of Columbus.
These are just two faces of the same hissing, roiling monster that created potentially bank-breaking coronavirus hospital bills. This brutality is in every sense the pudding’s proof that the ideals laid out in the document honored on Independence Day are just that — ideals, not the real conditions created by the Founding Fathers, or the 244 years of faltering attempts at democracy that have followed.
So how do we come to terms with the fact that the United States is, by every indication, more committed to death, subjugation, and grief than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? If there’s anything that makes sense to me, it’s a protest chant I’ve often heard here in New York: “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe.”
In March, I wrote about how the coronavirus had prompted a wave of mutual aid organizing. In that piece, I cited the anarcho-communist writer and thinker Peter Kropotkin, whose definition of mutual aid was based in a Darwinian evolutionary framework. That is, Kropotkin viewed mutual aid — helping one another survive — as a natural path toward the evolution of any species.
Anarchism like Kropotkin’s has much to offer in terms of how we might reshape our society to pursue the ideals that get paid lip service in the Declaration. Consider the words of Emma Goldman, whose writing about prisons dovetails with the ways abolitionists are calling on all of us to reimagine a world without police or prisons:
“Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread contagion,” Goldman wrote in 1917. “Society goes on perpetuating this poisonous air, not realizing that out of it can come naught but the most poisonous results.”
Goldman believed that what was needed was not a reformation or re-creation of prisons (“I fear it is impossible to hope for good results from pouring good wine into a musty bottle”), but a vast re-ordering of the entire society based on how people relate to one another.
“Nothing short of a complete reconstruction of society will deliver mankind from the cancer of crime,” she wrote. “The first step to be taken is the renovation of the social consciousness, which is in a rather dilapidated condition.”
Though Summer Taylor and Vanessa Guillen died more than 100 years after Goldman's words were written, they are victims of this dilapidated social consciousness. They were put in harm’s way by protesting against or participating in the dual iron fists with which this country rules: the police and the military.
Let that be the guiding light in honoring their memories, and the memories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and everyone else victimized by how our current order uses violence to reinforce itself. If we are to end this death cult’s reign, we must actually create the conditions where Black lives, Indigenous lives, queer lives, and all lives forced to the margins are made part of a unified respect for the right to live.
Maybe then we can move on to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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