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Posted by on Nov 25, 2014 in Blog, Politics | 8 comments

The Ferguson Verdict

 

ferguson-riots

 

“The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts….”

— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

 

The Ferguson matter reveals the growing crevasse between voyeurs with little or no personal insight who make snap judgments far too quickly.

On both sides.

This means you.  This means me.  This means protestors in the streets.  This means opportunistic activists and agitators.  This means looters.  This means the racist sickos who post hateful messages in the comments sections on news forums.  This means politicians.  Indeed, this means just about everyone who wasn’t either: (1) a witness to the original incident, (2) part of the investigation, or (3) a member of the grand jury who declined to indict a police officer for a crime.

Please tell me what special insight you have into this matter?  Fact is, you have none.  You’re a talking parrot.  You’ve chosen to live inside an echo chamber, which exists within the walls of biased news outlets which cover this and all issues in a one-sided matter, and your own insular communities which always seem to group together long before getting any actual facts or contemplate making an impartial judgment.  You’re utterly incapable of rational thought.

Whatever the controversy, we do tend to pile onto pre-calculated teams and then play our positions in the ongoing debate which lacks an end or satisfactory resolution.  This certainly applies to the three most recent racial controversies of our times — Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown.  Indeed, old habits die hard.  Although each case was utterly unique in nature (different times, places, people, and circumstances), they all share a common bond.  That similarity is race.  Accordingly, most of us either jumped into the black camp or the white camp.

In short, the ice cream shop known as America isn’t a swirl.  It’s Neapolitan.  It’s separate blocks of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.  And it’s more than skin deep.  It’s philosophical.  It’s political.  It’s cultural.

Our lockstep impulses purely along racial lines render virtually all opinions to be contaminated.  The residue of this bias extends way beyond Ferguson.  Our predisposition to judge before we learn makes it impossible to accept truth as fact.  Worse, it poisons our capacity to empathize.

No doubt, many black citizens are justifiably outraged by the way they’ve been treated and portrayed.  Racial profiling is practiced.  Discrimination lingers.  Economic opportunities which exist for whites simply do not exist in most black communities.  And then there’s a growing perception that black lives “don’t matter.”  This all makes for a boiling cauldron of discontent with treacherous consequences for society.

Yet, how can we not sympathize with the daily plight of the typical police officer?  Imagine a job where the next radio call could be your last.  Think of the constant dangers of dealing with criminals in a society which not only allows guns but has spawned an epidemic of shootings in the tens of thousands.  Too often, we forget that the man or woman behind the badge is human, capable of mistakes and errors in judgment.  But the police officer isn’t allowed to have “a bad day.”

Last night’s violent unrest exposes the chronic deterioration of trust that large segments of our population have which undercuts law enforcement and our legal system.  Once trust is lost in the officers and institutions authorized to protect us, violence becomes the predictable fallout.

So, what will happen next time?  What happens when another Rodney King is beaten, another Trayvon Martin is killed, or the next Michael Brown is shot down by a police officer somewhere in America?  Are we destined to go through this again and again?  Accordingly, who is it that suffers most in the sometimes bloody aftermath?

Passions inflamed by centuries of prejudice and discrimination will continue to make urban zones into an incendiary tinderbox.  Yet the oppressed certainly do themselves no favors when significant percentages rampage through their own communities and ransack the businesses of their good neighbors, supposedly as a manifestation of protest.

Is there a solution?  Might we eventually reach a point when the next controversy doesn’t break down along racial lines?

Actually, there is.  It starts with trying to really understand.  It begins with empathy.

If we truly wish to avoid these self-destructive differences, we must first step outside of our own comfort zones and look at things from the opposite perspective.  That takes an open mind.  That requires a willingness to challenge our basic assumptions.  That demands courage.

I wish that could be the collective verdict we all take away from the Ferguson mess.

READ:  Michael Baden does autopsy

8 Comments

  1. Not bad at all man.

    Somewhere in the middle of it all, the answer hides.

  2. again you TOO paint with broad brush – I did NOT jump into the black camp or the white camp.
    I saw King get beaten and I did not know what race cops were
    maybe same as my brother and sister and her husband,
    What I saw and the cops went to jail for – was brutality.

    what was the vote of the GJ? it was not unanimous!

  3. “a bad day” shooting in/at back is not a bad day – is is a CRIME. any part of incident is a crime -than you have grounds
    for convicted of something-

  4. the White camp/Black camp comment is silly. There is no open mind in a community that burns down and steals from their neighbors in the name of justice.

    He attacked an armed cop telling him to stop and got shot. Predictable… It’s far more a class problem than a skin color problem. Black, Latino, White trash ALL get shot there.

    • can agree on Class thing,. or COP vs Citizen thing

  5. I think this is one of the best articles written on the story. I totally agree that it can only begin with empathy and putting ourselves into others shoes, not matter what side. There is wrongs on BOTH sides. The main problem though of it all is that we call it SIDES. There shouldnt be sides, there should be one entity…HUMAN. However, most people do not know how to be one.

    My only disagreement is how you assume we know nothing because we were not there. I will give you that sort of. However, some of us actually look at all angles, put ourselves in the shoes of others, and take in as much as we can on a case or a story before forming our opinions. Some of us don’t use our race, upbringing, or political ties to form our opinions. Like me, we are free thinkers and we make our opinions from all the information we can collect.

    Rodney King was doing wrong. However, they excessively beat him and got off. Totally wrong. George Zimmerman, I believe, acted in self defense. Michael Brown, I believe was murdered. I think Michael Jackson is innocent, and OJ is guilty as hell. And as far as recently, Casey Anthony was guilty, and Bill Cosby is guilty. How do I have racial ties? And ALLLLLLL of these cases, I have gathered EVERY bit of information I could possibly get ahold of and read or hear to make these opinions of mine. Do I know 100%? No… and neither does this Grand Jury. Only ones who know is Wilson and Brown, who is now dead. However, we can start getting somewhere if we base our opinions on information, instead of affiliations or race. Until we destroy this line that his been drawn and step across it to help one another, we will continue to have events like this happen. For me, who has the empathy we need, it saddens me because I know fixing it will take a very long time if ever. I cry for all us. The main word in the work humanity is human, and I just don’t believe there are to many good ones anymore.

  6. Nolan, my father-in-law Ken Adams shared your post with me, apropos my being in Berlin this week to speak at a conference about media and race (and Ferguson, the media and black crime, protest, etc.). I’m still quite jetlagged and won’t say much out of fear of being incoherent. But – I generally agree with the premise of your post. Not sure if reactions to Ferguson demonstrate a failure of empathy (I’m sure it does in some respects, though I think there are limits to people’s ability to empathize, particularly when matters of race/class are involved). Seems to me though that there there is certainly a failure to recognize complexity – in the actual incident, the aftermath, the GJ proceedings and decision, the aftermath… And, of course, we all know that news media/complexity is practically an oxymoron…

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