Image by Ye Jinghan.
“Felon” is not a dirty word.
At least it shouldn’t be. But lately I’ve been noticing a disturbing new trend in liberal protest signage. Somebody came up with “F-ELON + FELON” and it’s popping up amidst other signs at rallies calling out disastrous threats to free speech, cuts to healthcare and education, environmental regulation rollbacks and firing of civil service workers.
A “F-ELON + FELON” sign even showed up at the weekly downtown standout I attend where a bunch of us gather every week to protest the Israel/U.S. genocide of Palestinian people. We’ve been doing this since October 2023. Some of us wave Palestinian flags, others carry messages intended to remind folks that guided missile systems made right here in Maine along with our tax dollars and complacency are responsible for incinerating entire families in Gaza.
What’s with these FELON signs? Is this someone’s idea of clever?
The U.S. locks up more people than any other country in the world, and the latest figures I could find (from 2010) estimated there are 19 million people in this great country who are burdened with the collateral consequences of a felony conviction. This includes both those currently and formerly incarcerated, and the number is undoubtedly even higher today. Black and Brown and poor people are disproportionately represented in these figures.
The staggering rate of felony convictions is the result of our profit-driven industry of mass incarceration, systemic racism, crippling poverty in a country run on capitalist greed, draconian drug laws, and a host of other factors. None of this should be surprising. For too long we’ve been mostly passive, while oligarchs from the two major political parties drag us into further decline.
Genocide-enabler Biden was also the architect behind Clinton-era “criminal justice reform” and therefore responsible for not only the mass carnage in Gaza but the era of mass incarceration in the U.S. He’s an unindicted war criminal, but he’ll get away with it and Democrats will line up to buy his sanitized memoir when it hits Amazon’s warehouse bins.
I’m not plugging Amazon here, quite the contrary. Support your local independent bookstore! There are lots of reasons to boycott Amazon, including the cloud technology it provides to Israel’s military to make apartheid more efficient and deadlier for Palestinians. If that doesn’t bother you, what about Amazon’s abysmal rates of worker injuries in its fast-paced warehouses?
But I digress.
Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon are criminals too, and surely there are plenty of nasty words that could be used to describe them. Surely you can come up with something more creative than FELON.
When you use the word FELON pejoratively, it is a slap in the face to every parent who’s got a child in prison, every son or daughter who only gets to see their mom or dad in the confines of a stifling visiting room with plastic chairs, vending machines and patrolling guards, every spouse who waits for that fifteen-minute monitored phone call to let them know their husband or wife survived another day of hell. When you use FELON like it was a dirty word, you are pissing on every person in this country whose felony conviction limits their career choices, their housing options, their possibilities of a decent paycheck and maybe their voting rights.
While neither Democrat nor Republican war criminals will ever see a day behind bars, there are lots of fine, principled women and men in this country – former political prisoners with felony convictions – who continue to work every day for an end to genocide, militarism, racism, poverty and environmental devastation. These are people who paid huge prices to try and create a better world. They didn’t wait till Trump got elected to get out there with protest signs. They continue to hit the streets, to educate, to organize.
So please, stop using FELON as a dirty word.
