This summer featured at least a dozen stories of black Americans across the country having the police called on them for little or no reason at all.
Famously, two black men in Philadelphia were arrested while simply waiting for a friend at a Starbucks.
Last month I visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL. The names of the as yet identified victims of lynching are displayed movingly in steel columns suspended from the roof on a county-by-county, state-by-state basis. Having lived in four slave states during my lifetime, I had a lot of counties to investigate. I drive past Rosewood, FL a few times each year. I was in Charlottesville, VA just two weeks after last year’s debacle. Where does it stop. It begins to stop in the heart for each individual. That cannot happen with poisoned politics. I wish I had the answers because I am shamed by those who think that I belong to their misdirected sense of “honor” and “superiority”. Last week, I saw large Confederate flags flying in Ohio–OHIO! Parasitic hate has metastasized and the divide-and-conquer cabal is to blame. Peace, if possible.
I bet these guys from Ohio flying the Confederate flag are also “Honor the troops” types.
Ohio had the highest Volunteer rate in the United States of America’s Civil war. Sheridan and Ulysses S Grant were from Ohio. It akin to honoring the veterans of Dday by while flying a Swastika .
Stand your ground laws are the height of stupidity . Were one to see a Black man legally carrying a Gun and a White Man carrying a gun , the article above illustrates that US society will “fear” the black man more (unless they also call the police when they see a white guy getting into a car) . If all they have to do is “fear for my life” then it just a licence to shoot that Black guy carrying the gun on site.
Aren’t “stand your ground laws” an attempt to realize robber baron Jay Gould’s nineteenth century vision that half the working class kill the other half ?
A typical modern conundrum: laws simply are not effective in curtailing or transforming violence.
We make laws in an attempt to address a perceived problem, only to find the problem metastasizing. Becoming immune to legal enforcement, in just the same way and for the same reasons as cancer cells grow immune to chemo and bacteria become immune to antibiotics.
The problems created by the asymmetrical development and use of our cognitive minds will never be resolved from the same level of consciousness that created them.
To pretend otherwise is to admit defeat from the outset. To devote oneself to endlessly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic, and then to blame life for not providing one with a more elegant vehicle!
A whole new basis is necessary to the success of our species’ quest to evolve beyond violence.
Stand You’re Ground laws are nothing more than a get-out-of-jail free law, for murders.
WiseOwl, you do have the answer, you just don’t know it.
You ask, “where does it stop”. It stops with education. Racism is a taught skill, were not born with it. Education and co-mingling of races diffuses this skill. I live in one of the biggest slave states, and I can tell you in the 40+ years I’ve lived here, racism has dropped dramatically in that time. I’ve seen kids who I know were taught to be racist by their families, refuse it and embrace people of color. I attribute that to education and ending school segregation.
My point is we all have it in us to refuse racism and teach others not to be that way, you do that in you’re posts and I’m sure in you’re daily life.
Stand your ground laws and most gun control laws would be obsolete if we had open carry.
Say you are a mugger, school shooter, or other gun carrying criminal, who would you attack, persons you could see were armed or those you assumed were not?
Concealed carry makes one vulnerable to attack. Open carry prevents it.
B-b-but it would be the wild west again!
That’s like saying things were terrible before the trillion dollar failed War on Drugs. Or that domestic terrorism was such a problem before our murderous, permanent trillion dollar wars.
One needs to recognize that America will never give up its guns nor should it, as Washington, Jefferson and all our forefathers told us. We need learn to live with guns:
We will learn to live with guns like the fucking fear mongering conservatives do, or we will continue to be their victims.
"Every just, revolutionary war is endowed with tremendous power and can transform … must grasp the truth; “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun . " … If you are afraid of war day in day out, what will you do if war eventually comes ?”
Mao ZeDong
Using your head is not an option when you should be using a hammer. Turning the tables by standing OUR ground is how we’ll survive to teach others.
