Demanding Justice, Not Tolerating Abuse

The moment we stop confusing survival strategies with moral obligations the world can start to change.

May 18, 2025

Inevitable or escapable? Bonus or what you are owed? Trigger warning: we’re going to talk about abusive dynamics and police brutality.

Bonus or What You’re Owed?

If you show up to help a friend’s band unload at a dive bar, you probably expect nothing, apart from a free drink. Maybe you don’t even expect that, and if the band tosses you a few bucks, that’s a bonus.

If you show up to work and payroll never seems to process, well, my friend, you got screwed. You are entitled to that money. “My boss pays me sometimes, but I don’t expect it,” is the belief of a conditioned victim.

If the bar gives you a free beer for helping your buddy, that’s generosity. If your employer withholds pay, that’s theft. We need to stop confusing the two. Wage theft, is not only theft, according to the Economic Policy Institute it surpasses the financial impact of all other forms of theft in the United States.

Yet, wage theft remains largely normalized and invisible. Take nine million dollars from one person everyone cares, take $9 from a million people, no one really bats an eye. In theory, state, and federal agencies, along with labor lawyers exist to help you collect. In practice these agencies are often overwhelmed, and private attorneys often struggle in collecting damages of under $20,000.

A million people don’t launch Place de la Revolution over $9 each. The victims of the system are disconnected, and often poor. Such is the dysfunction of the system, and this drives our collective resignation.

Systems Rely on Our Resignation To Dysfunction

Social change becomes impossible if people consider entitlements to be bonuses. When those who wait for the city bus that arrives with no regard to the schedule don’t complain because it’s better than walking, they’re participating in a kind of passive resignation. They’ve internalized the idea that they should be grateful for crumbs. This same logic shows up in housing, healthcare, and employment—where basic rights are quietly reframed as privileges, and accountability evaporates.

This quiet surrender to dysfunction doesn't stop at transit schedules or wage theft. We accept these things sometimes because we see them as inevitable and ourselves powerless to change them. This perception seeps into how people respond to power in every corner of life.

Throughout history, this pattern repeats. During the early Industrial Revolution, factory workers regularly lost limbs in machinery and accepted it as an unavoidable occupational hazard—until labor movements refused to normalize such sacrifice. What was once "just the way things are" became recognized as an intolerable injustice.

The longer we live with broken systems, the more likely we are to mistake neglect for normalcy, and exploitation for the way things simply are. At some point, people stop asking how to fix something and start asking how to live with it. When that mindset takes root deeply enough, the line between bonus and right, between injustice and inevitability, blur, and we have no corrective glasses.

Inevitable or Escapable?

Mistaking the changeable for the inevitable, appears in all manner of power dynamics, from systemic injustice to interpersonal abuse. In a family with a single dominant and abusive member, let’s say a patriarch for illustration, there is a tendency for the members of the family to view the abuser as inexorable. The movie ‘Thunderbolts*’ has a scene depicting a child whose father is abusing his mother. When the child stands up, not only does he face wrath from his father, but screams from his mother that he, the child, is making things worse.

In such an abuse dynamic, it is common for abuse to be taken as an inescapable fact of life. Something that is to be managed by fawning or freezing, and certainly not fighting back. Fleeing is not possible, "for reasons," always for reasons.

Fighting? Well, that just “makes things worse.” As abuse and abuser are treated like an endemic disease, something without a cure, something that must be managed to a stable and predictable prevalence, a hierarchy develops. A, the abuser, sits at the top, with B, C, D, and so forth all victims of A. Still, B while a victim sits above the others, and perpetrates some level of abuses towards those lower in the hierarchy.

In this kind of structure, children (or anyone without the autonomy to leave) are pushed out of natural, healthy responses. They’re left with nothing but adaptation and suppression. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the dynamic persists largely because the escapable is mistaken for the inevitable. It's the trickle-down economics of abuse, where a victim victimizes in an attempt to mitigate the situation, because they see abuse as ever-present, even when they could just escape.

Systems Won’t Change Unless We Change Them

The greatest trick of abusive systems is convincing people that what can be changed must simply be endured, or worse, that the changes needed are your expectations. We see that demand all the time in comments sections and the podcasts of weird gremlins whenever someone is killed by police.

Comments saying, "if she had put out that cigarette she'd still be alive,” are still burned into my brain after reading stories of the 2015 death of Sandra Bland. Bland died in a Texas jail cell, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop for allegedly failing to signal a lane change.

Officials ruled her death a suicide. Some have asked if that is true or something more sinister. Regardless of her cause of death, would she have died if she hadn’t been put in jail? The video of the traffic stop and ensuing arrest shows violence and hostility on the part of the arresting officer. The traffic stop escalated when Bland refused to put out her cigarette and questioned why she was being asked to step out of her car.

Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia ordered her out of the vehicle, threatened her with a Taser, and forcibly arrested her for what he described as “assaulting a public servant." Watch the video yourself: Encinia escalated what should have been nothing more than a ticket for a failure to signal.

When Bland says she is epileptic, the officer responds “good.” To say, “if she had put out that cigarette she'd still be alive,” is to say police escalation is inevitable. I’m far more than tired of hearing people suggest that public servants acting as aggressors is something that must be managed to a stable and predictable prevalence by fawning.

Brian Encinia, the Texas State Trooper at the center of this all, was indicted for perjury, because on preponderance of evidence he lied in his report. He escaped prosecution because he agreed to give up his law enforcement license. He’s alive and not in jail. Sandra Bland is not; she died in the jail where Encinia very possibly lied to put her.

Texas lawmakers passed The Sandra Bland Act, that required Texas police to collect more data on traffic stops and make a “good faith effort” to divert people with mental illness away from jail. Bland’s family settled a wrongful death suit for $1.9M.

Cold Water

This is the part when most editors would tell me to be balanced and point out law enforcement is a hard, dangerous job, and that police safety matters. The cold water here is the job is not nearly as dangerous as people often claim. Further, no one is forced to take a job in law enforcement.

In 2023,1 the Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were 796,800 police and detectives working in the United States. We can assume that number was about the same during 20242 when the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund recorded 148 officer deaths which translates to approximately 18.5 deaths per hundred thousand officers per year.

I do not wish these deaths to have happened; however, 18.5 deaths per hundred thousand is about the same risk as living in any large city. It's a statistical reality that undermines the narrative of extraordinary danger.

Of the 2024 law enforcement deaths 27 were automobile crashes3 and 17 were struck by vehicles, these together have a death rate of 5.5 per hundred thousand. By comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says in 20234 the United States overall had approximately 13.4 deaths from motor vehicle-related injuries per hundred thousand.

The rest of the 104 law enforcement deaths of 2024 include 385 job-related illnesses; 6 were crushed, drowned, electrocuted, or fell. Of the remaining: two were stabbed, three were beaten, two died in airplane-related accidents, and one died in a fire-related accident. 52 were shot, that’s 52 out of 796,800, 6.5 per hundred thousand.

In 2023, the United States has 13.7 gun deaths per hundred thousand people, but only 5.2 per hundred thousand when you exclude suicides. Law enforcement deaths by shooting in 2024 were 6.5 per hundred thousand, about 25% higher risk of a gun related death than the average American. Now, do police act only 25% more paranoid than the average person?

Encinia was not pulled over and forced into law enforcement. He chose the career; he chose to engage Bland, who was pulled over with no choice in the matter. The person with no choice to leave did not survive the results of that engagement. I remember the comments following Sandra Bland’s death, with people saying how dangerous a job law enforcement was and how she should have just complied because he, “deserved to get home to his family.”

Breaking the Cycle of Passive Acceptance

Repeatedly, I saw that the cops got excuses for bad behavior. The idea we all need to avoid agitating, the trained, armed folks, during the interactions they chose, because if we make them nervous bad things will happen is prevalent. It’s an idea that screams, “the bad cops are inevitable,” but nothing about injustice is inevitable.

Abusive dynamics in workplaces, families, or institutions like law enforcement exist because people don’t change them. The slight rewards that come from playing the game (things like maybe not getting fired because you expected $9 for that hour you worked, or not going jail for a crime you did not commit) keep people playing instead of building guillotines. People get a little, and act grateful, rather than demanding what we deserve. The cycle continues because we've been trained to see basic rights as gifts.

Throughout history, from the labor movements of the 1900s to civil rights activism to campaigns today, progress has come when people reject the false choice between "accept things as they are" and "suffer even worse consequences."

The moment we stop confusing survival strategies with moral obligations is the moment our world can start to change for the better. When we recognize entitlements are not bonuses, when we see power systems as changeable rather than fixed, we begin the work of dismantling oppressive systems.

Observe the pattern. Label the dynamic. Recognize false limited choices. Build the guillotine, or just leave the situation accordingly.

Header image by Patrick Feller is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

As is my custom minor updates to spelling were made after publishing. The title was also changed from ‘Stop Confusing Survival with Morality: We Don’t Have to Tolerate Abuse’ for more clarity.