Despite the title, this post is not about politicians.
Here's hoping third time's the charm. Since I can't change the fact that twice yesterday, what I wrote disappeared when I tried to post it, I'm going to assume it wasn't worth reading. Every job needs the proper tools. You wouldn't paint a watercolor using a brush meant for painting houses and you wouldn't try to run a marathon in cowboy boots. The flip side of this is using the tools at your disposal to do the job in front of you. For instance, if all you have in your fridge is eggs and cheese, you wouldn't try to make spaghetti, would you? Doesn't matter how much you crave spaghetti, if you're stuck with eggs and cheese you'd best change the menu. Turns out omelets are mighty tasty. Life is a lot more fun and satisfying when you learn to use the tools at your disposal to accomplish the job at hand. That's really all I wanted to say. I am worried about the militarization of the police in this country. I've read too many accounts of officers reacting, over reacting to what ought to be small time events. Not just municipal peace keepers, your city cops but to law enforcement at all levels. Why does the Bureau of Land Management have a SWAT team?? Plenty has been written about incidents that have taken place all over this country, in which police officers, in their attempts to control a situation, cause far more mayhem than the citizens they're supposed to be protecting and serving. Considering the way the Ferguson MO case of Michael Brown and the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida were covered by the press, I admit to being very skeptical of what I've read. But I remember a lot of things and I can't help connecting the dots. Back in the '90s, we had tons of stories lamenting the lack of 'affordable housing' all over the country. The articles cited among other things, the difficulty that folks without any means of support had in getting mortgages. Yes, back in the olden days, if you had no income it was tough to convince a bank to lend you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Can you imagine? In their infinite wisdom the federal government (which wisdom is actually less than the cumulative wisdon of a random class of kindergarteners) decided that something must be done. I imagine the conversation in Washington going something like this: "Hey, did you see the NYTs? It says the poor* can't get mortgages." "Dang. That's not fair. Just 'cus you don't have a big, fancy job shouldn't mean you can't live in a house. Someone should do something." "We're the US congress. We could do something." "Hey, yeah! Lets give the poor enough money to buy houses!" "I don't think we can do that." (this imaginary convo took place before the age of Obama, when the feds discovered that they could, indeed, do that.) "Well, we have to do something." "We can make a law!" "Dang! You're right, we can!" "Let's make it a law that the poor can get mortgages!" "Dang. How's that gonna work?" "We can't give the poor money but we can sure as shit force the banks to give 'em mortgages!" "Dang. That's genius." * In political terms, "The poor" means "Democratic voters" and "The rich" means "anyone with a job". Within a few years of all those articles on unaffordable housing, the laws were changed, taking the judgment of who is a good lending risk out of the hands of banks and bankers and pretty much forcing them to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who wanted to buy a house. It was a win-win! Everyone got a house and since the market was now so flooded with buyers, existing housing stock values went through the roof, developers and builders worked over time, those of us who already owned homes found our hovels were now worth so much we could refinance and fix our places up into the McMansions we always aspired to... It was a Golden Age! Until 2008, when this artificial, government created bubble burst, collapsing the housing market and dang near collapsing the entire global economy with it. "We meant it for the best!" So now, the press is all in a lather over the militarization of the police. You know what I remember? I remember articles from 15 years ago or so, lamenting the 'lack of diversity' on big city police forces. Since 'lack of diversity' in today's politically correct world is second only to conservative hypocrisy on the sin-meter, it was clear that something had to be done. Early articles described that what was done was a lowering of standards. Both test scores and psych evaluations had to be more flexible, so as to allow a more diverse population to qualify to cruise our city streets carrying guns and badges. No way that could blow up in our faces.** If the police in our nation are behaving badly, the thing to look for is not 'racism' but who are we giving badges (and guns) to and what are the guidelines under which they work? As Mark Steyn has written: if an innocent citizen winds up dead and the police are exonerated because their actions were 'by the book', then they're using the wrong book. So yes, I think we have a serious problem in our country regarding the police; who they are and how they do their jobs. But the more I learned about what happened in that street in Ferguson MO, the less it sounded like an out of control cop and more like an out of control teenager making fatally stupid decisions. If my belief that an eighteen year old is capable of lethal stupidity even while being black makes me racist, then I'm racist. I just don't see how pigmentation exonerates one from the ignorance and imperviousness of youth. Was there a better way for Officer Wilson to have handled the situation? Maybe. Maybe a more experienced cop would have been able to take down a large young man with a guilty conscience charging at him without the use of lethal force. We have no idea how many times a day that very scenario is played out all over the country. But we can't leap to the conclusion that when an unarmed combatant ends up dead, the armed survivor is necessarily in the wrong. That's why we have investigations. That's why we've developed entire fields of forensic science, from blood spatter analysis to autopsies; to discover what really happened. Innocent until proven guilty really has to apply to the police as well as the rest of us. After all, don't we believe in equality under the law? These values used to be universally held by Americans. I'm not saying there haven't been times when those values haven't been lived up to; I'm aware of history. When humans fail to live up to their ideals, when they subvert their values, we need to punish the wrong doers, take away their power, throw them from office and if required, put them in jail. You don't just shrug, say it's too hard and scrap your values. Innocent until proven guilty. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the Grand Jury in Ferguson to indict Officer Wilson. They could have chosen to appease the mob and their consciences by telling themselves that ignoring the evidence and sacrificing one cop in the name of racial harmony would have been for the greater good. They didn't. Whether they realized at the time or not that upholding the law, by following the evidence and finding according to the truth (as we can know it), they were upholding a much greater good than appeasing a blood thirsty mob. Racial harmony achieved by railroading the non guilty isn't worth pursuing. It bothers me that our president and his attorney general don't seem to care about that. Their carefully worded expressions of sympathy toward the rioters, race baiters and looters in Ferguson do nothing but undermine the people's faith in our system of justice. Instead of using this event as an opportunity to build bridges, to assuage the fears of a community that firmly believes they're being preyed upon by the power structure, Obama and Holder used it to fan the flames of suspicion and distrust. It's bad enough when charlatans posing as self appointed leaders, like Al Sharpton, exploit the fears of the community they claim to speak for but when the POTUS and his attorney general do it, it's treacherous. What possible good could come from the top law enforcement figures in the land to imply that the system doesn't work, that it's biased against race? Especially in this case, where the initial story of an unarmed teen being gunned down by a trigger happy cop had everyone, regardless of race, appalled but as more and more evidence emerged it became clear what happened? In fact, the system worked exactly as it should; the truth outweighed all the emotion. Sometimes the system fails. Any endeavor involving humans is fallible. But when the system is 'Innocent until proven guilty' and 'equal under the law', the failures can usually be chalked up to the people involved and not the system. The fix there is to change the people. More problematic than the way police behave in this country is the way the press covers everything. They fan the flames of discord and resentment. If it takes a little poetic license to get a riot going, well isn't that what 'Freedom of the Press ' means? No. In fact, what the press engaged in down in Ferguson has literally been to incite riot. A popular rebuttal to absolute freedom of speech is that you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. The reasoning behind this cliché is that you can't maliciously cause a riot. A Fire Marshall's job is to walk through places like theaters and say "This place is a powder keg; get rid of the piles of dry hay under the gas lamps, unlock the emergency exits and install sprinkler systems in case of actual fire." He's not allowed to run through crowded theaters screaming "FIRE! FIRE!". The job of the press in Ferguson was to say "This looks bad. Lets find out what happened." Instead, they've run through he town screaming "RACISM! POLICE BRUTALITY! MURDER!" On the other hand, one is absolutely allowed to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater if its actually on fire. Benghazi. The IRS scandal. The architect of Obamacare describing the deliberate slight of hand used to ram it down the throat of Americans. The elimination of the southern border. Ebola. Executive orders. The nation is in flames and the fourth estate is silent. But in Ferguson, the mob screams "Crucify him! Crucify him!" And so it goes. |
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