Justice has been served, a man will not be tried for defending himself from a criminal assaulter, robber, and police-assailant:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30188737
However, the criminal aggressor will nonetheless be seen as the victim, and the victim as a bloodthirsty, pugilistic racist. Disgusting- we all lose.
Do you have anything you want to tell us, Simfan? Anything going on in your personal life?
Yes, I would like to say I am a person who likes his local shopkeepers un-assaulted and un-robbed, and someone who prefers that police guns maintain in police hands and not physically grabbed from them. I am a person who sees no reason to believe that a literal and indisputable robber and assaulter, perhaps even a committer of hate crimes (he said some nasty things to the South Asian shopkeeper, if I recall correctly), was somehow the innocent victim of a bloodthirsty bigot who just happened to coincidentally be in the area as the aforementioned assailant and robber was fleeing the scene.
And I am also rather offended (I would say indignant but my emotional supply is being used elsewhere at the moment) that this criminal is now supposed to stand for all us black men, that "we are all Michael Brown".
Absolutely not! I don't rob bodegas, I don't assault shopkeepers, I don't fight with police and try to grab their gun. Brown should not have been shot dead, but he was unambiguously criminal.
I am not a criminal. I have lived in New York for most my life (yes, actually) and the most serious altercation I have had with a police officer was when I was 7-8 and touched the rims of a police car and was loudly berated by an officer. I have worked in the Bronx for a summer, I have walked all across Manhattan, in the middle of the night, and in un-affluent neighborhoods at that, and not once have I ever been as much spoken to by a police officer. I am black; despite the sweaters or bow ties or suede shoes, I am a black man. Whatever cultural or educational or monetary "privilege" I might possess would count for diddly-squat to some racist bigot cop. And yet here I am.
One last thing- the activists made a major blunder in focusing on Ferguson, on Brown, when their poor teen-aged victim turned out to be a violent delinquent, and not even in some milquetoast "he smoked marijuana some time prior to the shooting" manner as was the case with Trayvon Martin.
The contemporary
shooting of John Crawford in an Ohio Walmart, a father buying food for a family barbeque, and who happened to be carrying a pellet gun
sold in the store, by a police officer who did not as much bother to notice whether or not the shoppers in the store seemed to be alarmed, as anyone would by an "armed gunman" roaming the store. He was shot,
in the back, while casually talking on the phone. Then, as he crawled up towards where he had stood, surely utterly confounded as to what had happened to him, the trigger happy cop shot him once more in cold blood. Crawford probably died without knowing why. The Grand Jury also declined to indict the bandits masquerading as law enforcement- and
that is a travesty, as is the fact the attention of civil society groups and the global media was instead focused on making and debating the image of an innocent and blameless young man who was anything but.
And yes, Snowstalker, there are things going on in my personal life. I'm damn well near breaking point trying to finish a research proposal term paper by my self-imposed deadline tomorrow, which is unmovable because of the other, what, three?, term papers I also have to find time to write, and am positively livid at the various people (computer technician, oversleeping friend, professor who has elected to
ADD a class on this coming Wednesday that we were not supposed to have!) who are getting in the way of my finishing my work and have wasted upwards of a dozen hours of my time. I am extremely stressed out and fraught with anxiety, yes. I am frustrated by the mere fact that I am writing this post (to Snowstalker of all people!) when I should be working. I am increasingly agitated by the mere act of typing this post.
Simfan out. RIP Michael Brown, may he enjoy the peace in the next life that he tragically lacked in this.
