Re: Baltimore
Just to make clear two things. Obviously, I was NOT directing my fire at CA (whom I respect even on those rare occasions I disagree with - and it's not even that I disagree with him in all the details here) but at Obama's remarks and secondly, while I was intending to be flip and a bit shocking, the VERY IDEA that this country has turned its back on this element of society is laughably absurd. You know why I get sick of hearing about the poor and underprivileged in this country? It's because our country has the richest "poor" in the world and we dole out things for them that often make them live "better" than the middle class guy/girl who actually has to pay for medical coverage (for example).
Those poor were poor BEFORE Freddie Gray died - I didn't see them rioting THEN. They'll be poor next week or at least until the shamed Republicans join the party of Tax the Rich Not Named Us and throw federal monies at it.
And furthermore I would hope everyone would keep an open mind and wait. If the
Trayvon Martin thread should have taught us ANYTHING, it is that we need to wait until making a judgment either way. Maybe this is my lab and (to a smaller degree as it was only introductory) pathology training dominating my personality. In medicine, we play hunches and we adjust as need be TO THE EVIDENCE. This whole thing has sounded strange from the get-go. I have in no way gone after Freddie Gray's rap sheet (which I was aware of) because even if everything there is true, it does NOT justify police brutality.
By the same token, NOTHING justifies a riot, not even the weasel words of the nation's leading community instigator. (Why is anyone surprised at this absurd empty suit's justification that's not "really" a justification of the hood?). (And btw - don't forget that those same Democrats who start whining about this stuff send their kids to private schools and live in their own gated communities all while pretending to give a damn). I'm not taking a side here yet because I want to know what the autopsy and patient history show - medicine again, which is why I wound up taking Zimmerman's side in the Trayvon case (because I read the forensics) and siding with the cop in the Michael Brown case (which we later learned had a lot of made up eyewitness crap).
A black friend of mine at work and I talk about this stuff. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree. But he did say something profound. He's fifty years old so he was born during the civil rights era. He tells me over and over he was told by his parents that if a cop stops you and makes demands and talks to you as if you're DWB, just say, 'Yes sir' and give him what he asks for and keep your hands visible.
And the simple truth is that while there is the occasional renegade cop with a John McClain complex, it's no different than any other occupation. There are lousy lawyers, lousy doctors, lousy lab techs, and lousy cops. But the fact is that in most of these cases if the suspects would simply go quietly rather than channel their inner Jimmy Cagney, nothing would happen to them.