There are times when the utter depravity of this society makes my blood boil. This was certainly the case when I read about a recent incident in Silsbee, Texas.

Two years ago, a young woman on the high school cheerleading squad in ths small east Texas town was assaulted by three men at a post-game party, dragged into another room and raped by one of them, Rakheem Bolton. Bolton was a star on the school’s football and basketball teams.

Bolton was arrested a few days later after being identified by the victim and other eyewitnesses. He and another player were charged with sexual assault of a child, a felony. But the grand jury quickly withdrew the charges, allowing Bolton to return to school and play for its teams.

School administrators told the victim that it was her responsibility to avoid contact with Bolton and the two others who helped him. This was especially difficult, since the victim was a cheerleader and Bolton was a star player on two teams. So,she decided she would cheer for the school’s

team, but refused to cheer for Bolton directly. For four months, she carried out her silent protest about Bolton being given a pass to play for Silsbee High, until she was pulled aside during halftime and ordered by the district superintendent to cheer for her rapist.

The victim’s parents sued the school district, claiming they violated their daughter’s First Amendment rights. The district court said her silence “conveyed no specific message to onlookers.” The parents appealed.

In September, the appeals court upheld the verdict of the lower court, saying, “as a cheerleader, [the victim] was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering.” In other words, the victim, because she is a cheerleader, should forget about the rape and just cheer.

Meanwhile, Bolton struck a plea deal with the courts that allowed him to walk away from it all with a misdemeanor assault charge. He’ll pay a fine, do some community service and take “anger management” classes.

Rape culture, as defined, is the “normalizing” of sexual aggression and violence, mainly by men against women (women do sexually assault men; but the percentage is very small).

For women, it means accepting terms like “b***h” as a display of dominance, it means having to live in fear of being raped (one in six women in the U.S. are raped at least once in their lives), it is blaming the victim for being raped, it is telling women to dress conservatively in public, as well as where to go, to carry mace, to take self-defense classes — in other words, it is placing all of the onus on women to simply avoid a potential rapist, as if rapists are a normal and accepted part of society — as if there is nothing for men to do to fundamentally change their actions and behavior.

It also means most women don’t bother  to report being raped (two-thirds of women as estimates go), often because they don’t trust themselves or trust the courts to prosecute.

We see rape culture in the Silsbee case, with almost no one in the town, except the victim and her parents, questioning whether Bolton should have been allowed back at school, much less allowed to play for them.

In this country, a woman is raped every 30 seconds. In the time it takes you to read this column, at least four women will have been raped (and perhaps one of them will report it). If there was ever a part of this culture in need of some revolutionary justice, it is this. But that cultural revolution can only happen in the context of a larger upheaval and rupture with existing social relations.

From Massachusetts and Michigan to Arizona and Texas, Democratic Party offices were attacked with bricks, bullets and bats while messages containing death threats were left in numerous voicemails on the machines of local Representative offices.

On Saturday, several House Democrats were attacked as they walked from a nearby office building to the Capitol. African American representatives were spit on and called “ni**er,” while Barney Frank, an openly gay Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, and his partner were called “fa**ots.”

Democrats and some Republicans were quick to denounce the “violence” and call for “civility.” However, the GOP mouthpieces also felt the need to rationalize these terrorist attacks, calling these expressions of rightwing violence a kind of “legitimate anger.”

Admittedly, hearing that kind of cheap rationalization did make a number of us angry, even though we expected to hear it.

If we, as revolutionaries, had attempted to justify such actions this way, we wouldn’t even have the sound bytes completed before the black bag was put over our heads and we were on our way to Guantánamo Bay (or wherever it is “terrorists” are taken these days).

The media would have called us “terrorists” from the moment that the news broke, and we would be demonized until manufactured “public opinion” called for our heads.

This says a lot about the role of violence in society. When such actions are carried out by the exploiters and oppressors, it’s not “violence” or “terrorism,” but “legitimate anger.” It is only when the exploited and oppressed express their “legitimate anger” that it becomes “violence” and “terrorism.”