In case you may have forgotten, Alec Baldwin has still not been arrested. It has been six months since the actor pointed a real gun at real people, pulled back the hammer, released the hammer, and thus fired the gun towards real people with no shielding or protection. While that might result in a criminal charge of at least neglect for average people, Alec Baldwin is no average people. He’s a celebrity people. And celebrity people have special privilege that others do not enjoy — while simultaneously they preach about privilege. It’s always someone else who has that, though, so no worries about them.
You might also expect the social justice crowd in Hollywood to be demanding “Justice for Halyna” at this point. But no. There are no protests outside Baldwin’s home. There are no demands from the rooftops that he be removed from all acting gigs ever to come his way. Instead, the man who killed an innocent woman six months ago receives cute little puff stories like how he and his wife raise their children in Entertainment Weekly. No doubt that’s a strategic piece to earn him sympathy:
“We have ‘somos un buen equipo’ engraved on our wedding bands. We say that to each other all the time at home — that we’re a good team,” Alec and Hilaria told ET in a statement. “One of the most beautiful things my children have experienced with a big family is how the heart can grow with every new sibling. Our capacity to love continues to expand and we can’t wait to embrace our new little one this fall!” she added.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CcVKfYmuK4W/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=60c440d9-d87e-4306-833e-651e099f05bc
It must be an amazing sense of power to know that you can own and run a film company where you set all of the rules, then you can shoot a woman causing her death within the rules of said film company, and you will not even be arrested, little alone charged. That’s real power.
Now we’re about to see just how far Baldwin’s power reaches. New Mexico has said that they are expecting to release a detailed report on just how mistakes were made that allowed an actor to point a live firearm in the direction of human beings with no protection, pull the hammer, and release it. That report is due out Thursday:
A report into possible workplace safety violations on the Alec Baldwin film set on which a cinematographer was killed is expected to be released this week.The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) has said the report is “on track” to be delivered by Thursday, six months after the shooting on the set of Rust in Santa Fe.
— Sky News
Will a report out of government officials showing the incompetence of a company run by Alec Baldwin be enough to shake Hollywood into some sort of public statement? I wouldn’t count on it. While they’re all too eager to jump up and down about basic human rights when there is no cost, doing so towards Baldwin would have some minor cost to them. Thus they will hold onto any feigned anger in tweets they could send from a diamond-crusted designer swimming pool overlooking the Los Angeles skyline. When you live on such economic margins, you must be very careful about when you apply your virtuous axioms out loud.
That might be why a Hollywood crowd that leapt into action over teaching sexual orientation in kindergarten is utterly silent when it comes to human rights abuses at a scale we may have never seen in China. As of this writing, it is estimated that as many as 500 million people in China are currently under some kind of lockdown and isolation causing hardship on their lives. The city of Shanghai is seeing a very limited relaxing of COVID restrictions, but the city of 30 million has for weeks been at the edge of starvation as people are shuttered in their apartments and refused the right to leave. Incarcerated in their own residences, they’ve watched as their pets have been captured and beaten to death by thugs in all-white uniforms.
The insane abuses towards people and pets will not just stop at China’s borders, however. No… if you thought supply chain shortages were bad before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
With Shanghai in a near total lockdown, this is a map of the commercial ships currently waiting offshore to be loaded and offloaded of goods; exacerbating global supply chain woes pic.twitter.com/Md6PtpF3VE
— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 18, 2022
Caution: The next tweet is disturbing.
26 million people in lockdown in Shanghai.
People are committing suicide from their balconies and Pets from people getting tested positive for #Covid are being collected to be killed and slaughtered in #Shanghai / #China
This is pure evil!
— Enes FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) April 16, 2022
In comparison to how strongly Hollywood spoke out about Florida’s legislation to ban sexual orientation instruction in kindergarten classrooms, how do you think they’re doing with their outrcries about human rights in China?
There are some truisms when it comes to how you identify people who are good. One is that they try to orient their lives in such a way as to be consistent. Another is that they try to at least speak out, even if there is some risk, when they see something unjust or even evil. After all, not telling the truth is how you can arrive at a society where people are leaping out of apartment windows to avoid the pain of starvation in a city of 30 million. Every little lie matters. When many lies build upon each other and when people give into an authoritarian determination that the truth is unallowed (or worse, that the truth no longer exists because everyone has their truth), that’s how you arrive at the horrors the news media won’t report about China.
But maybe, just maybe, there are people around the world who are better than our “stars”. Look elsewhere for your compass and maybe new constellations will appear where our society will raise up icons that aren’t so silent when innocent women are killed at the hands of an actor. Look elsewhere for your compass and maybe new constellations will appear where our society will raise up icons that aren’t so silent about mass-starvation, isolation, and torture inside a communist country where forced labor produces cheap goods (and mass pollution) for the world. And that would be a better world indeed.
For all the latest on news around the entertainment industry, keep checking out That Park Place! If you’d like to add your own thoughts to this article, feel free to leave a comment down below. Our readers aren’t like Hollywood, nor are we — we’ll stay consistent in our calls for human decency and dignity.
