In 1963, folksinger Bob Dylan wrote a song entitled, Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the man who shot and killed civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Dylan was making the point that even though the man who pulled the trigger was the culprit, he was not the real culprit, he was simply a pawn in a much bigger game. When I was watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trail, the verdict and aftermath, this song, this refrain, “only a pawn in their game” kept coming back to me. Whether Kyle Rittenhouse was guilty or innocent, he was only a pawn in their game. Everyone else involved, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz were also only pawns in their game. And all the people who are lamenting, crying, protesting the verdict are also pawns in their game. It is the game of the powerful and the politicians who run things, and manipulate situations like this to their political advantage.
No one cares about any of those people involved, they only care about those people to the extent that they can exploit them to further their narrative and promote their political agenda. How do I know this? In Chicago last weekend, 65 miles south of Kenosha, 21 people were shot, 10 were killed, including a 4-year-old child, and most of the victims were black. There are no protests, peaceful or otherwise, about those deaths. That level of violence occurs every weekend in Chicago, very few of the shooters are arrested or tried, and nobody cares because those deaths cannot be used to further a narrative or an agenda. Why would the trial of a white person killing 2 other white people bring out Black Lives Matter protesters, yet the shooting of over a dozen black people in one weekend not attract their attention? All the people in the Rittenhouse case are merely “pawns in their game”.
None of the people frothing on TV about justice in the Rittenhouse case spoke one word about any of those people shot and killed in Chicago because no one cares about those deaths. Are their deaths any less tragic than Joseph Rosenbaum or Anthony Huber? Of course not, but yet all the people who love to hear themselves talk were eerily silent about the deaths of 10 people in Chicago because none of those deaths serve their purposes, because they don’t care. Yet they laser focus on the deaths of these two people, because those deaths can potentially further a narrative for them which in turn can give them more access to power and control to push their agendas. It is absolutely disgusting, and evil. Every death is tragic. All lives matter. Not just the lives and the deaths of the people who can give you more political power, but all lives matter.
Even the life of the four-year-old who was shot in a crossfire last weekend in Chicago. His life mattered. But no one from Hollywood, no one from the NBA, no one from the Democratic Party, no one from the Republican party, no one will mention that little child’s name. He didn’t go to a riot with a gun, he wasn’t setting cars on fire, he wasn’t bashing people over the head with a skateboard, he wasn’t breaking through a window at the Capital, he was just a little kid being a kid, and he caught an errant bullet from somebody else’s fight. And nobody other than his immediate family gives a damn. And the way he was shot is far more endemic in this country than what happened in Kenosha or Minneapolis or at the Capital. If it was a white cop who happened to shoot that four-year-old black boy in Chicago, suddenly the people who don’t care about him right now, will care because he will become a new pawn in their game.
There are thousands and thousands of people in this country who die tragic deaths every year, whose deaths could’ve been avoided, if those in power who could do something about it actually gave a damn. Over 100,000 Americans have died from drug overdoses this year, and our border is still wide open, and fentanyl is pouring across it, and no one in power is saying or doing anything about it. We are all pawns in their game. It is not about Kyle Rittenhouse, Joseph Rosenbaum, Ashley Babbitt, or Jacob Blake, they are just pawns in their game. Their game is about the rich and the powerful who manipulate the narratives, who push their selfish agendas to exploit and manipulate the average citizens for their own gain.
Every illegal immigrant crossing our border is a pawn in their game. Every oil field worker who lost his job when they shut down the Keystone XL pipeline is a pawn in their game. Everybody who threw Molotov cocktail during the riots of 2020 was a pawn in their game. Every store owner who watched his business burn to the ground was a pawn in their game. Everybody who is yelling and screaming back-and-forth about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict or George Floyd’s death are merely pawns in their game. You and I are pawns in their game. We’ll be used and abused, and manipulated as long as it serves their purpose. We’re all pawns in their game.
What’s their game? Congress just passed a $1.8 trillion “infrastructure” bill which has very little infrastructure spending. That’s their game – controlling the purse strings of the United States government. Who gets to spend the trillions of dollars, who receives the trillions of dollars, is the game they are playing. And we are all pawns is this game of thrones being played out on the American political stage. While the country we all love disintegrates around us as we continue to fight among ourselves, those in power and those who paid to put them there, get richer and more powerful.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.