Thursday, December 4, 2014

Something Is Broken

I’m not a lawyer, I wasn’t there, and I didn’t hear or see the evidence and testimony.  But it sounds to me that if you have a coroner rule a death as a homicide and a banned technique such as a choke hold is listed as a contributing factor in the death, and when you have the entire incident on video, it makes you wonder what is broken when a grand jury cannot find at least one crime has been committed.

The anger and frustration on the part of a number of communities is understandable.  The protest marches and the raised voices on TV and in the street grab our attention.  But what is even more corrosive and damaging isn’t the anger.  It’s the resignation on the part of many people that this ruling and the one in Missouri last week was inevitable; they knew what the juries would say before they said it.  The system is rigged against them, it always has been, and nothing has really changed since the days when a black man died for having the nerve to not back down from the rule of the white master.  “We shall overcome” has been replaced by “same as it ever was.”

The worst outcome isn’t that people will riot in the streets, torch buildings, or even get MSNBC hosts snarking at each other like middle-schoolers.  It is that we will give up and accept the fact that the system is broken; that justice is only for a certain segment of society and that anyone who dares challenge the rulings or the way they are arrived at is promoting lawlessness and disrespect for the rule and the rulers.

Nothing will change if those who are seeking the change just give up.

Bonus: Tom Tomorrow.

4 barks and woofs on “Something Is Broken

  1. This 69-nine-year-old (little-old-white lady) refuses to give up….we’ve fought all these battles before, and it pains me that we have to fight them again. I have faith in the new voices that they can win it again….FSM, doG, and karma-god help make it happen…

  2. This is becoming ridiculous. It happened here in Ohio at least twice in the last year. The police need to think before they act. All lives matter.

  3. Interesting that from appearances (I haven’t dug into the actual data and I’m going off impressions) as crime has dropped LOE behavior has grown worse. It’s like today’s police miss the bad old days when violent crime was actually a problem, and want to return to those times when they could go in guns blazing and play hero (that in those scenarios the villains were disproportionately POC is entirely coincidental [/snark]).

  4. It’s as if white police officers are urging each other to send a black man to the morgue and white citizens are…applauding vigorously. And the same thing has been happening for a hundred years.

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