It finally happened.
Someone reached their breaking point.
Someone no longer could stand seeing how black men like him were being gunned down by police when being shot should not have been an option.
Someone lost hope that corrective actions were in progress to stop the
assassination of innocent black men. Unfortunately
in the past year there was no nationwide emphasis, discussion, or action by
police forces throughout the nation to stand down and review how police deal
with black men specifically and black people period. No government official took the lead to
ensure hiring policies and training of police was reviewed. The message black men got was “deal with it”.
A black man shot and
killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The
murder captured on video. Then in
Minnesota, a daytime traffic stop. Then
another black man shot in his car with his fiancée in the passenger seat and a
4 year old girl in the back seat. The
man dies. The protests begin again. Protests that before did not lead to changes
in how police approach and interact with black people. Then someone took
matters into their own hands. That
person for his own reasons allegedly hated white people. The repeated shooting
of black men by white police men apparently molded his feelings towards all white
policeman. I don’t condone his actions,
but how he got to his breaking point is easy to understand. When someone feels they are targeted by a specific
segment of legal authority and nothing is being done to protect them from abuse of power, you go into a
protective and then deadly offensive mode.
The anger and hopelessness built up in one individual and
was released against the Dallas police department. The talk show hosts, news personalities, politicians,
and other self proclaimed experts need to understand one point. You don’t have to be mentally ill to carry
out the kind of assault that happened in Dallas. When you reach a point of hopelessness
anything can happen. And it did in
Dallas. No policeman shot a black man in Dallas that week. Unfortunately innocent policeman became the outlet
of rage felt by the individual who carried out the assault. The event could have happened in any town against
any police force in these United States of America.
The politicians, police chiefs, mayors, etc. who took no
action to stop the continued police actions against black men can now look in
the mirror and share the responsibility for fanning the flames of hopelessness. Those same politicians could have stressed
retraining of police, better screening of police, development of better
relations with the black community. But
they did nothing. So, don’t give me your
outrage at what happened in Dallas.
For those who will now go into backlash mode against the
“black lives matter” movement and now stress how our police are under attack,
don’t try it. Please don't try to hide the historical fact that European
Americans annihilated the Native American race in this country. History shows how black people were forcibly
brought to this country to be slaves of European Americans. History shows a record of black people being
lynched and no action taken against those carrying out the lynching’s. We’ve long known that black people
historically have been abused by police and killed under suspicious
circumstances at routine police stops.
So don’t talk to me about feeling that white people and the police are now under
attack. Welcome to our world.
The
ending of the deadly events in Dallas reminded me of a scene I saw on the
national news in the late 60s or early 70s.
A black man was cornered on the roof of a
building in a large metropolitan city.
The video showed a helicopter with a policeman shooting the man to death
with more bullets than seemed necessary.
It looked like overkill. A decision
had been made that the man would not be coming off the rooftop of that building alive. In Dallas a decision was made that the killer
of the policemen would not be coming out alive.
A robot served as the jury, judge and instrument of death. I thought to myself. The two policemen who killed the black men
are walking around on paid administrative leave. There doesn’t seem to be any rush to bring
them to justice. On the opposite end if
a black man kills someone, the authorities use deadly force to kill him. Don’t worry about bringing the black man to
trial. Just kill him and end the
conflict on the scene. Don’t waste the
public’s money and endanger more lives. I thought to myself, now that a black man used military weapons to kill police, will a more serious push for more gun control occur? We will see.
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