Sunday, July 14, 2013

Ain't nothing good about any of this...

     I'm generally not prone to discuss those things of a political, social or, well, important nature.  I live to wax poetic and stupid and make folks reminisce and laugh.  But sometimes something crawls in your brain like a fox into a chicken house and you can't get rid of it unless you put pen to paper...or fingers to keyboard.  See, there really is no good side to any of this.  A kid is dead.  A Barney Fife-wanna be that shouldn't have been out playing cop with a loaded gun - the one that rendered the kid dead -  walks free.  I'm not smart enough to dig into the nuances of legalese and it's lexicon of words like  manslaughter, murder 2 and statutes and standing one's ground.  I am smart enough to know that someone's dead implying that something happened.  For the guy with the gun to go free implies that nothing happened and I reckon therein lies the quandary of putting reality and our justice system on the same page.  That's why we have lawyers and there sometimes comes a day when they're not able to put reality and justice on the same page.  Such is the case with this debacle. 

     For all I don't know about this there are a couple of things I do know.  One is that the divide in our country between those of different colors now grows further.  Our founding fathers envisioned a country that could become a melting pot where human beings weren't divided by class and color.   That was a long time ago, though.  And too many instances of human stupidity since then put great distance between that ideal and our reality.   Slavery and the trail of nastiness it created, from battles in a civil war to battles for civil rights.  Then there was the little matter of the people that were already living on the real estate we needed to create this Utopia of freedom.  They had to be dealt with and not always in ways that were fair or kind (Manifest Destiny and all that...)   We've had many, many opportunities to narrow the gap between "me and you"  and we just can't seem to do it.  Reason being, it seems, that same stupidity - it  keeps getting in the way.  I reckon it's time to admit that human beings are, basically, stupid.  Seems the Good Lord would've seen that one coming and knew we couldn't handle free will well at all.

     The other thing I know about this is that people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton aren't going to help the situation.  There's that whole matter of hollerin' "WOLF!!"   You've done it so many times and made countless situations about race that, in fact, weren't.  So now we have a tragedy that probably is ALL about things like race and profiling.  But no one is going to listen to either of you - you killed your message a long time ago.  Especially Mr. Sharpton (I can't bring myself to insult some of my favorite preachers in the world by calling him "Reverend.")  Tawana Brawley ring a bell, anyone?  Someone during that debacle caught him on tape saying "If we can pull this off, we're gonna be the biggest (word that got Paula Deen in trouble)s in New York City."  His goals are all clear and none of them have anything to do with justice for anyone.  And NBC gave him a job?  I've got to admit, when that marathon in Boston was marred by the tragedy of a bomb (and more human stupidity) and I turned on MSNBC and they had him reporting the breaking news, I changed the channel to see if a bomb had actually gone off  in Boston. 

     So there's nothing good going to come of this.  It becomes just another strand in a complicated web.  It makes me sad.  Someone may tell me to keep my trap shut because being a middle-aged white guy affords me "fairness" in all situations.  I'm confused though - a considerable chunk of Cherokee Indian DNA flows in my bloodstream (thanks to my maternal grandmother's side of the family.)  So where does that put me in this melting pot?  I mean I really need to know where I fit in the ongoing battle?!    "I SCREAM JUSTICE FOR.........WHATEVER THE HELL I AM!!!"  Or I could just deem myself a human that needs to love and support my fellow human beings regardless of their appearance, their language, what God they follow, what meats they consider unclean  and on which side of the railroad tracks they live. That's an ideal we've worked on for over two hundred years now.  We sure ain't there yet...and we just took a step backwards.