To put things lightly, the past week and a half has been quite rough. In Nice, France, a terrorist affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant used a cargo truck to run over and kill over 80 people and wound at least 200 more on Bastille Day. In the United States, two men were killed by police officers. One was Philando Castile, who was shot four times at point-blank range by a lawman while Castile was reaching for his identification. Castile had informed the officer that he had a legally concealed firearm, and the relatively inexperienced policeman mortally wounded him. The second shooting took place in a convenience store parking lot, where one Alton Sterling was selling CDs and happened to match the description of an armed robbery suspect. Sterling was tackled to the ground and shot while being restrained, again by relatively inexperienced police officers who believed he was reaching for a concealed firearm. Both of these incidents were caught on cell phone video.
Watching those videos was absolutely brutal. Two men died seemingly right in front of my eyes and there was nothing I could have done to save them. I knew that something had to be done, but what? I looked to the people who were trying to make a difference.
In Monument Square in Portland, Maine, about five hundred people gathered to hear the voices of young, black Americans during an open mic protest. Most speeches involved racial profiling from police and school teachers all the way down to the common passerby. One speech that really stood out was a ten minute story made by David Thete, a student of Cheverus High School.
David, like most black kids who grow up anywhere in the United States, has had his own issues with law enforcement and other authority figures. He grew up black in a white man's world, and was always seen as someone who was acting up, even when he wasn't. His story is not uncommon, and people of his race, age and sex are being gunned down all the time.
Hamdi Hassan, a black woman who attended the ceremony, said she faced a level of discrimination so enormous that she transferred to another college to avoid the hatred. She said people would call her things like "towel head" due to her religious customs of wearing a head garment. In America, discrimination against Muslims has been all over the headlines because of an orange, short-fingered miscreant who wants to close the borders to all Muslims, simply because an extremely small portion of them are jihadists. As a reminder, there are nearly as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians, and the vast majority of people do not believe that we should close the borders to all Christians for fears of another Crusade.
While jihadists do exist and do make headlines for lining the streets with the bodies of the innocent, we cannot hope to defeat them if we assume that their entire religion, which encompasses a vast amount of belief systems, of which an additional vast amount are peaceful.
However, the powers that be seem to treat all black people the same as they treat Muslims. All seem to be guilty until proven innocent, instead of the other way around. You know, the way it should be.
A fight exists within all of us to change the way we see people. We are all living on this planet, fighting each other because we are different. The fight seems to be split hundreds of ways. Until we can bring the conflict to two belligerents, to simply those who are wrong and those who are right, we can never see change. The fight in America is between the black community and the police. However, it's not that simple, because much like Muslims, the vast majority of police officers are not killers.
Police officers are just like us. Their job title doesn't automatically make them non-human, incapable of fear or being misjudged. They make mistakes. Unfortunately, though, when the police make mistakes, people can die.
No one likes to be told to change or else, though. The only real, peaceful way to root out institutional racism that plagues the justice system is for the justice system to do it themselves. Putting progressives into high-up positions within the legal system and instituting a larger amount of sensitivity training and an emphasis on non-lethal force could save a lot of lives. Making the mind of the cop stronger instead of giving him a bigger gun would certainly ease some tension. The policeman who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice resigned from his position at another department rather than face termination because he was not mentally stable enough to be a police officer. Lackluster vetting before hiring a cop led to a child being killed.
Until we can stop fighting ourselves, we cannot hope to fight our enemies. Until we are all on the same team, we can't do anything truly positive. Those who commit misdeeds should be punished, not people who look like others who commit misdeeds. An ocean of innocent blood runs through the whole world. The dead are different from the privileged, but they bleed red all the same. Hatred pulls the trigger, stomps the gas and mows down millions of people. This week is not the first, and definitely not the last of the bloodshed and confusion.
We can fight and kill our enemies, but it will only kill a person. Ideas, both good and bad, are never as small as one person. People can be educated out of hatred. So what are we waiting for? Let's get this show on the road.
