Ferguson!
As most people know, there has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the latest shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white person with a gun. The most famous one up to this point was the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin encounter down in Florida in which George Zimmerman stalked and then killed the teenager after a scuffle ensued in which Zimmerman was supposedly coming out on the losing end. In that event, again, a grand jury refused to indict Zimmerman and he went free.
The main piece of tangible evidence in the Michael Brown encounter with the Ferguson police officer did not even involve the shooting itself. It involved the black teen’s taking of some tobacco products from a store that sells them just a few minutes before the fatal event occurred. This relatively minor crime of shoplifting has caused many on the neoconservative right to label the deceased Mr. Brown nothing more than a thug who got street justice by the empowered police officer. It also caused the champion in disguise of the neoconservative right--Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe--to go on a rampage against the main stream media for their coverage of Ferguson in general, and of Michael Brown in particular. Scarborough also called Brown nothing more than a thug.
All of this thug calling belies the fact that Michael Brown was getting ready to go to a trade school where he was going to learn a skill that would have benefited he and is family for the rest of his life. He had graduated secondary school and was simply out enjoying the day in which he was killed. It was wrong for Brown to steal those smoke products but even his 290 pound six foot, four inch frame was no match for this officer of the law who, for what ever reason, found the need to shoot the boy/man until he was dead. Darren Wilson, the cop of record, had every right to defend himself against an attack but the officially released evidence photos show that there was almost no damage to the officers body at all. But that has not had any affect on what those who disparage Brown have to think, if they think at all.
The result of this shooting causing grave unrest inside of Ferguson has generalized the feeling that the black population there has done a collective wrong by rioting and stealing from the city’s stores. In reality, the feeling among much of the general population in this country appears to be that this is the way that blacks operate when they feel that they have been wronged, no matter what that wrong may have been. Little has been said that of the fifty three police officers on the Ferguson force, only three were black in a city where over sixty percent of the population by the last census was black. Mounting frustration is not to be condoned among a population of people who, in much of this nation, are seeing their hard won victories of the late fifties and through the 1960’s begin to be eroded away. Twenty three states under conservative control have instituted a project to remove as many as seven million black people from the voting rolls simply because their name matches some ones in another state. Blacks tend to have the same names from state to state because that is what, in so many cases, their white counterparts also have. But, this project does not touch white voting rolls at all where so many also share names with others cross state lines that they have never met in their lives nor never will.
How many white kids have shoplifted something during their lives? How many of them have been judged, convicted, and killed on the street for doing this? Black males cannot help it that they are so often bigger and better put together than so many of their white counterparts. In part that comes from their origins in this nation as total slaves of their plantation masters who used them to toil the fields of their cotton plantations for centuries before the American Civil War supposedly freed them from that task. We have also heard the argument that black families do not raise their children up correctly and that they instill in them a culture of entitlement, of taking, as part of their rights in life. Trayvon Martin had paid for his snacks at the local convenience store before he was killed for walking with a hood by a man who made himself judge, jury and executioner in a state that sanctioned that by its adherence to stand your ground laws even when the ground he was standing on had little reaqson, according to the evidence, for him to be where he was at.
One of the most poignant editorial cartoon we have seen lately shows a back mother hugging her teen age son wordlessly with a worried look on her face who asks her in return what is wrong because he is only going to the store for some snacks. This writer knows some black mothers of very modest means who do their very best, so often alone, to teach their children right from wrong. However, what do you say to them when they are grown and stopped by the police for driving while black if they even have a car, or how to explain to them that they cannot vote because they have been cast back into second class citizenship by those who want power at all costs and by any means available to them? How do you explain to them that the Voting Rights Act passed in the mid sixties has been gutted by a Supreme Court where the deciding vote was cast by a black man who cares for them not at all? And, how do you ask them to support a nation and its government that allows these and so many other gathering transgressions to occur when so many of them cannot even vote for those who will not represent them even if they could?
When one drives through St. Louis County on the Interstate one sees a sign stating that this is the exit to “historic Ferguson”. Well, Ferguson has some new history these days and it may be reflective of what is coming for this entire nation if some things do not change, and soon. Martin Luther King believed in non-violence but we wonder what he would think of he were alive today and could see what is being done and taken from his people through so often violent means.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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