In Middle School, My Parents Went Through A Really Ugly Divorce. My Mom Got A Boyfriend During It, Which

In middle school, my parents went through a really ugly divorce. My mom got a boyfriend during it, which pissed my dad off.

One day I was out shopping with my mom and my sister called us asking us to come home because my dad had come into the house and absolutely fucking destroyed it. You could hear my dad in the background screaming that my mom better come home or he was going to kill us all.

We took him very seriously and rushed home, because he was unmedicated bipolar, had already broken things in our home, had been physically abusive to us in the past, had PTSD from war, and had access to guns. When we got home, my dad threatened to kill my mom and his four children (age 8, 13, 15, and 17) right in front of us. The cops told my mom that they can't legally make him leave because he hadn't actually touched a person yet and his name was on the mortgage. What they did instead is ask him politely to leave the premises for the night. My mom called his commanding officer (Army) to try to get some help and all he did was make my dad promise not to kill her. Both the cops and his commanding officer told my mom that his feelings were just really hurt because she brought her boyfriend around the kids, and that it was probably a good idea not to bring him around us anymore.

They did absolutely nothing to protect me and my entire family from my father's EXTREMELY credible threat, where he was physically present, had already been violent, and was actively threatening to kill us.

But I'm monstrously relieved to know that they took down Brianna Boston with $100,000 bail and a potential 15 year jail sentence for her vague threat to a corporation in general. Glad to know a woman with no firearms, no intent, and merely speaking out of frustration was considered a credible threat. When our justice system says "serve and protect," they clearly don't mean women and children in domestic violence situations. They don't mean the average person who's just fed up with a system that steals from us and puts our lives at risk every single day.

They just mean rich, white men and corporations.

Brianna probably shouldn't have said what she said. But I'll defend her with my last breath because she stands for something that the vast majority of us already felt. That nobody is looking out for the average person. That nobody values our lives. That our justice system is unfair and will protect the rich fiercely, but not us. A rich CEO dies, and we'll support it and everyone defending it, because he was just one more person in the long line of powerful people that didn't protect us. He's just one more person who left us for dead when he had the power to help. And we are so sick and tired after decades of struggling that we just don't feel like we owe it to him to be the bigger person anymore.

Just so we're clear, this is not a threat of any kind. I have no access to firearms and I have no plans to, nor would I ever, harm anyone. This is not a manifesto or a potential motive. It is an analysis of the situation in context.