January 30, 2015
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Trayvon, Brown, and Garner were not innocent men whose deaths were ignored. The courts checked the facts and realized there was no wrongdoing. (It was the same story with Rodney King, incidentally, but our justice system decided to kowtow to public pressure.)
When a cop does commit a crime, as was the case with the broomstick handle that went up Abner Louima’s ass, charges are filed. Officer Justin Volpe is serving 30 years for that atrocity. The average charge for rape is 65 months, but Volpe got more because his violation put all cops in jeopardy. NBC did the exact same thing to the entire country and they”re not even paying a fine.
Don”t get me wrong. If we did live in a post-apocalyptic world where aristocratic whites stuffed their faces until they needed a vomitorium while poor black kids starved outside, #BlackBrunch would make sense. It wouldn”t be comically ridiculous to stare at those fat cats until they tasted guilt in their eggs. If cops were assassinating black kids for sport, I would want them to pay with their lives. This scenario, however, is an Eddie Murphy sketch at best and a Mad Max movie at worst. It isn”t reality.
Here on Earth, criminals are getting away with murder. By ignoring gang violence and pretending murder is about legal guns and cops, we are ignoring the real victims”plenty of whom are white, but, ironically, the majority are black. Of course we need to prosecute the thugs who are responsible, but where is the media’s culpability?
Their mantra of “If it bleeds, it leads” has left them with blood on their hands. By editing the Rodney King video so the public didn”t see him leading a chase through residential neighborhoods and resisting arrest, they instigated a riot. By doctoring Zimmerman’s 911 call, they polarized the country and got people killed. By running with the rumor that Mike Brown had his hands up, they leveled entire areas of St. Louis; and by pretending Eric Garner was a street vendor who was strangled for no reason, they sealed our fate as a racist nation on the brink.
Gangbangers are animals who deserve an early death, but at least they have some rules. They tend to avoid killing a rival when he’s with his kids and they keep their wars mostly within their own turf.
The media has no such boundaries. They are happy to plunge the entire country into a state of chaos for a few extra dollars. They burn communities to the ground and enable thousands of murders in order to get a desk by the window or a pat on the back by the boss. Pushing the “Hands up, don”t shoot” agenda isn”t as bad as personally torturing and murdering two white teenagers, but you don”t get one without the other.
