There Is ONE Reason WE Can't Blame Government

The absolute, number one reason that WE will always struggle to reach the change that WE all desperately desire is functionally a GHOST.

A mythical monster that never could harm you because it can't even touch you.  Well, it can touch you for sure.  The movie "Ghost" proved that they can touch you, but they don't have the power to keep you paralyzed and downtrodden like we often allow ghost to do as we lazily lay in bed, afraid to even go relieve ourselves because of these unseen spirits.

No matter who you talk to these days, it seems WE all have some complaint about our nation that WE've calculated to be caused by corruption- our code word these days for Government. In the estimation of way too many Americans, Government Holds Our Society in Terror and is the primary reason for most every problem under the sun. If there was something tangible that we mean when we blame government, we might actually be pointing our fingers at something others could see.

Don't misunderstand my position.  I recognize that the Tuskegee experiment really happened.  I am also very aware of the findings of the Ferguson Report and the scathing indictment that it has become against the police department that killed Michael Brown, as well as the institution of policing that is slowly and quietly admitting to a nationwide practice of some of the same stuff that we found in the Ferguson report.

Policing For Profit was the glaring outtake of the report, a practice that ALL police officers are familiar with rather directly or indirectly.  Since police squeal on police even less than the street gangs do, we are left to trust the words of the rare "Rat" that dared to open his mouth and expose the shield for the hope of saving the shield.

These honest cops (aka., Rats) admit that the quota demand for ticket writing sends them to the areas of the most vulnerable, those without the resources to fight off bad policing. A place of least resistance if you will.

Is that true government sanctioned racism or just an unfortunate byproduct of blacks still being mostly poor? In reality, poor people of every race seem to theorize corruption from the unfair collision of poverty and policing. Underneath the surface of such theories, lies the fact that the unfair entity is, once again, our infamous government with its ingrained methods of manipulating money from the masses.

Assuming that policing for profit is an entirely true example of government corruption, I find myself considering ONE key contradiction for this and every other corrupt government theory.

That was not a typing error.  For EVERY corrupt government theory, there is but ONE contradiction that makes them all a lazy way of resisting change by overselling our status quo and those who've created it.

You name the theory, I'll name the one simple contradiction because our disgust for government is wide reaching, not just limited to the poor and disenfranchised.

How about Trump's claim that the process of selecting a president is rigged while he continues to try and win at the hands of that system?

Or Bernie's disdain for the superdelegates system, so he waited 37 days to concede the nomination to Hillary so he could have time to court those same delegates that he disdains?

Or Hillary's challenge of the Citizens United ruling while stretching it's limits New England Patriot style for  the sake of down ballot fund raising? Or her promise to maintain and strengthen regulations on the banks all while they bankroll her campaign to become president?

Yet, these are just the boogey monsters of our presidential candidate's; their personal, pre-made excuse they use for how Government is Holding Our Society in Terror. You see, the really sad aspect of their GHOST and our's, is that they are all an illusion and nothing more than the excuse WE use when get socially and politically lazy, stay in bed and get all pissy, because WE just couldn't have our own political way.

Nobody every complains about government when government does what they want it to do.  Listening to those angry Libertarians, you would think that- other than the 2nd Amendment- the government was ill-conceived from the founding since the same Founding Father's who warned about the tyranny of men and how it is inclined to oppress, also wrote the damn document that allowed for all the tyranny and oppression they predicted. Was there no way to stop tyrannical men, or are they nothing more than a fear instilled from the start?

Our Constitution ratified both slavery and suffrage. It was molded with the notion that certain truths are self evident, but quickly corrected it's own language when those truths were not made evident enough. Among the corrections was the 2nd Amendment, which is widely questioned for it's intent, but not by those who find it to be the most brilliant piece of thought that lives in the document.  Through it, some see all other aspects of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness as possible.

Yet, our Founders did not include it from the start?

Some credit our greatness to the Founders, or blame our weakness on their followers who dealt with slavery, and expanded voting for everyone instead of just those deemed smart enough to know better. That remains the mentality that comes to oppose our current rise of ballot initiatives or Direct Democracy. For every modern legislative mistake created through Direct Democracy, traditionalists complain that people are just too unaware to be trusted with leading themselves in this fashion.

If there was a flawless blueprint for government, we would already have it in use. All self governance is inherently flawed, but it beats oligarchy. Ask the Founders. They knew flexibility would be our strength, and that no government will flex without force.  The Constitution of the U.S. was always instilled with an evolutionary design. What that means is, WE had the power to force out slavery, and will never be a slave to our own government because WE are our own government and the recipients of our own forces for change.

By the people, For the people is not just a cool slogan, it is a mandate that is achieved through ONE magical provision. WHICH ONE?

Before I share it with you, keep in mind that this provision too was NOT written into the original Constitution.  The ONE provision that insures WE are never a victim of our own government was written into the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights was retrofitted into the Constitution in 1791, four years after the Constitution was originally ratified (1787). If you are someone who actually values our Bill of Rights, you should recognize them as vital fixes to an evolutionary, but flawed document.

Some often look upon the brilliance of our founding as something divine and unworthy of challenge.  I see the divine blessing of America as our humility to correct our wrongs with a guiding document flexible enough to be fixed, as the absolute strength of this nation. What our Founder's achieved with the first magical amendment to the original plan was an excuse free nation, a band of people that would always be challenged to give voice to the changes they demand.

The First Amendment

_________________

Prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.

In one fail swoop, the First Amendment destroys 'blame the government' excuses and continues to contradict every last one of you who still tries to sell the theory that government is inherently corrupt.

Flawed?  Always has been. 

Corrupt? 
No corrupt government would leave the first amendment unchanged.  

If you are as hardcore as some of those Illuminati or Area 54 conspiracy theorist', you also have to accept that you found your own theory details and the corresponding Photoshop picture because of our free and unfettered press.

When situation demands, WE the People still have the power to stand up and be heard, even before we've ironed out the details of our complaint.  Though we often question the strength of our voice and our vote, it's mostly because that makes it easier to not speak up or vote when necessary...or to point fingers when we do both but still lose.

The BLM (Black Lives Matter) organization became necessary as a call to duty when Trayvonn Martin was killed in 2013.  By the time Michael Brown Jr. lost his life in 2015, BLM was ready to FULLY exercise their First Amendment duty to America and to themselves, even if few of us knew of them.

Ironically, it has been from the impact of two recent deaths of blacks at the hand of police, and the legion of video images of white people taking to the front lines of the BLM cause, that has opened our hearts to the same message that started with Trayvonn's death.

In reality, the message truly started in the 70's under Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers and probably long before that too if you consider MLK's and the civil right pleas against violence of the 60's, but somehow we finally hear the message and seem open to the potential for real change?  Was the change we are approaching simply waiting for white people to lead the charge?  Who knows...who cares?

Change is always possible in a government of the people, by the people.  You would think that our 1.3 million officers of the law across the nation would be in the forefront of helping reduce the number of guns on the street that could be used someday to kill them. Yet, many of  those same cops also seem to be the NRA gun lovers who would prefer cops that are anxious, edgy and increasingly in harms way above fighting to get some of these guns of war off of the streets. While we all work to legislate against razed gun violence and violence from suspects under watch, cops think more respect is all they require.

No matter.  The actual voices that are actually rumbling for something to get done, actually got both liberals and conservatives in Washington to draft and vote on gun restriction bills recently.  Neither side could agree on one of the four options they had, but getting something so polarizing to the stage of an actual vote is a significant victory that doesn't happen in a government conspiring one way or another.  Fixing guns in America could come to be much like the highly debated Bill of Rights itself.  After years and years of rigorous debate, we finally came to bipartisan agreement and ratified the Bill of Rights, the most important aspect of our entire Constitution.

That was government then, and this is government now.  A place where good people gather to govern.

It is also that dreaded, but magical GHOST that we run from when we're fearful, but chase after once we learn to appreciate it for what it is worth.  Like a ghost, our government has the power to reflect back on history and use it as a guide for the future. In fact, the government is best when functioning as our friendly ghost, using the clear trail of history to pave a path towards a mirky future.

Unless, of course, you're among those who dread government, in which case you see it as something more than just all of our friends and family that work there.  For every area of waste and corruption there are areas of benevolence and provision that come from government; benevolence and provision that we've not quite figured out how to accomplish absent the design of government. Even you smaller government types can't quite agree on what area to slice away first.

Are there flaws in such a model?

 The major flaw to our design is that most of us think government is only mildly functional when our chosen party is in control. Our government is actually no more flawed than humanity at large, which is mostly full of really good people trying to navigate the hurdles that a small percentage of bad people create. Because we change our opinion of societal success as often as we change presidents, much of our current trials come from our twisted perspective in which we "see the extremes in others while seeing the best of intentions in ourselves" (George W. Bush)

Government didn't purposefully breed those bad people who take advantage of leaks and loopholes in the system, nor did government intentionally imbue itself with so many leaks and loopholes.  What matters most is that our government is not immune to the lessons of history.  WE will rise and fall with the tides of life, and the focus of the greater good.

...and yes, governments do fall. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to convince yourself that your vote and your voice have little value.  Either our fate is NOT actually in our own hands and we are all actually doomed just like some of you say- or the government that caused all of this is also our only hope to fix it?

Katrina Reminds Us That Rising Tides Also Kill People

The recovery of New Orleans is clearly proving that rising tides do raise all boats- so long as you had a reliable one when those levies broke.

I've never been fond of celebrating or commemorating death and loss, but I understand that it's important to look back and determine where you've come from to understand where you are going.

Yes, republicans! Once again, the nation is engaging in another conversation about the lack of your concern for disadvantaged people in moments of crisis. Even before the smoke of the WDBJ7 killing had cleared, gun restriction proponents screamed foul... .......again, and cried for a fix.  

Was Valvano talking about a good day or
the essence of mental health?

The fix? 
We all should be crying for this FIX because its right before our eyes.

Coach Jim Valvano was really on to something when he declared that a full day means to think, to laugh and to cry.   The more I think about those words, they make me laugh and cry regularly.  I laugh at the struggle we endure to uncover solutions that lie at the tip of our nose, while I cry at the pain we experience from enduring life without solutions.  Whether you agree with what represents the fullness of a day, it is certainly mentally  healthy to think (rationally) to laugh (heartily) and to cry (from empathetic tears preferably) as often as you can.

MORE GUNS CAN FIX THIS PROBLEM?
(IS THAT A PROVEN THEORY?)

I'm not sure if anyone is giving the news a fair view or review, but the most recent story of vigilantism against terrorism is the fabulous story of those American boys in France.

If you didn't set out to be heroes then polo shirts and khaki's
are exactly the correct attire for being awarded.  Suits or uniforms
would make everyday folks forget their role in keeping us all safe from terror.
(read Robin Givhan's article on this subject)

Not one of these men had a gun in hand when they accomplished their victory over the man with all of the weapons.  The NRA and those who insist we must arm ourselves for the challenge before us have to recognize that George Zimmerman remains the poster child for this failed approach, and until someone- not in law enforcement or hired for security duties- pulls the trigger on terror, this peculiar theory remains just that, a theory.



The brutal, live recorded murder of the television journalist Alison Parker and her cameraman  Adam Ward has, once again, stretched the theoretical potential of terrors reach, adding to the imagination of the kind of people who mimic these types of behaviors.

If Dylann Roof indirectly pulled down that Confederate flag,  seeing Parker and Ward die this way should somehow begin the process of some reasonable gun restrictions.

Shouldn't it?

I will go down this road once again with my strong opinion on gun restrictions only because I can't let Andy Parker (Alison Parker's father) fight this fight alone.  He understands that each of US who really decides to get serious about this fight might need to arm ourselves and add to the gun industry in the short term just to prepare for the risk of fighting guns with words.

The fact that gun sales rise every time opponents fight too hard to limit them is a distorted behavior all by itself. The very inclination to reach for a gun with so little evidence of vigilantism's success is a sign of our own mental illness or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), probably caused by the unsettling violence of the world in which we now live.

 Regardless of which end of the lens you are viewing from, the story of mental illness offers enough  context clues for us to follow the pattern and at least lay down the first few blocks on the trail we should follow. How we ultimately fix this will be solved by collective resolve, stubborn resilience and powered by an agreement that we must do something to dig our way out of this mess, and it probably should begin where the soil is softest. 

How we impose restrictions on free American citizens just because they've shown signs of mental illness is a complex question with no easy answer, but so is democracy; so is the challenge of breaking down the powerful obstacle that political lobbyist have become towards fixing problems.


Nothing seems tougher than getting people to act for the greater good before a crisis hits, but ten years later, New Orleans used a corp of engineers and a brand new billion dollar levy system to finally repair the failed one.

Given the televised death of two local news figures and the impact its having on the media fraternity, can we now encourage one of those engineers and a few other really smart people to sit down with the research and the data and uncover the question:

Are more guns really the answer?
_____________________________________________________________________________

       Gun Deaths        Total deaths Homicide   Suicide Accident  Undetermined

    per 100,00 people   (combined)

United Kingdom	0.26 (2010)	0.05 (2010)	0.17 (2010)	0.01 (2010)	0.02 (2010)	Guns in the United Kingdom[67]
United States	10.64 (2013)	3.55 (2013)	6.70 (2013)	0.16 (2013)	0.09 (2013)	Guns in United States[68]

____________________________________________________________________________

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/2/214.full.pdf

What's more expensive than buying that gun is spending the money it will take to learn how to properly shoot it since a short little course will only do so much for you.  Eventually you have to pay to master the art of shooting, especially under stressful conditions, or you yourself become an accident waiting to happen and not the weapon of defense you intended.

As we start to get ahead of this problem, we might discover a value for both mental health care and free gun education for all of the mentally ill being bred in our violent society. instead of absorbing the cost of restoring those lives when environmental hazards move and clarify social divisions.

In reality, it was always going to cost too much and take too much time to fix the future of the poor families in New Orleans.  What I inspire in my children today might finally take root in my grandchildren or in their children because, before we become parents ourselves, most of us endure parenting rather than embrace it.

Stop Blaming Katrina

Katrina washed over one of America's greatest cities and uncovered what the folks in Louisiana wish we'd stop blaming on Katrina.

Stop blaming the revelation of a problem on the water that revealed it.  Children who live in areas with lots of death and violence grow to suffer mentally, creating a barrier between the good choices they would love to make and the hopelessness that makes it hard to remember why choices matter.

Katrina victims NEVER needed Governor Bobby Jindal to be a proponent of the frivolous lock up of  drug addicts and mentally ill people who only became more ill after the trauma they experienced; they needed mental health care to combine with that gumbo of resilience they brewed out of the remaining bits and pieces of  their storm tattered lives.

 Residents of New Orleans had seen plenty of storms and never failed to fix up and move on. In reality, the worst of Katrina mostly missed and should have left New Orleans in water up to their ankles.

If only those levies did not break.

This was and always will be a failure of infrastructure, one that we will likely repeat if congress continues to block the jobs bill that would fix bridges and roads and other weak areas of infrastructure that will also falter sooner or later, as will the excuses for why we waited to respond to this well known potential crisis.

New Orleans is a microcosm of an upcoming crisis.  Like our tattered roads and bridges, we have mistook standing for sturdy. The people of New Orleans are the reason for the success of this story, and with no great thanks to their resilience.  In fact, some residence feel that the appearance of sturdy resilience is often the excuse we use to avoid fixing the problems of roads and bridges or social disparity in New Orleans and across America.

Had the folks in New Orleans rolled over and coward themselves, would WE have been more aggressive with help?

Resilience is certainly the excuse we keep using for how WE the People are to endure another terror shooting, seeking to drown our lack of wisdom in a double dose of resilience.

Doesn't resilience mean I am enduring something abnormal?  When do WE stop applauding the resilience of New Orleans and start applauding our commitment to remove their need for it.

Fixing levies and economies is the easy part.  Mostly these take a lot of money and a little math.  Fixing disparity and terror caused by mental illness is tough because "How" is typically the start and end point of this conversation.

Republicans believe that no gun law would have stopped Vester Lee Flanagan from losing his mind and murdering Parker and Ward on camera that day. Its right to wonder how we can easily limit law abiding crazed people from getting and using guns; or how can we finally end this hurricane and remake New Orleans with both the flavor and spice from pre-Katrina?

These are real challenges, yet not tougher than the promise of democracy which could not have started before women had the right to vote (1920), and may never begin if voting restrictions persist and strong lobbyist keep controlling our power over reasonable change. 

Mental Illness Is a Sign Of The Times

Ironically, mental health care will provide the answers to fixing New Orleans as well since so many disadvantaged people also have histories littered with drugs and violence within the home and in their neighborhoods.  Violence begot violence, thus the only cure for the PTSD and mental instability that produces generations of bad decision makers is recognizing the signs of the time.  

5 years ago, the folks rescued on that train in France might have all died because none of us readily recognized this new revelation of mental illness and its schizophrenic effect on society as a whole.  Today we are more comfortably paranoid, yet no better at seeing the signs and symptoms of psychosis that produce terror, or social disparities teetering a broken levy away from disaster. 

New Orleans will always be uniquely hot, though it might not ever get back it's old spicy flavor.  Some folks are pleased with this change of recipe feeling that downtrodden places like the 9th Ward had been too bad a blemish on the community anyway, and fixing them too costly in more ways than one. 

Pain & Providence

Maybe we will laugh when we realize how crazy
we were before our mental health care initiative.

Ferguson was but a straw to the back of an old weary camel 

The founder of Black Lives Matter actually credits the Katrina crisis for inspiring this new camel currently carrying the burden of change. As we reminisce on the good, bad and ugly of Katrina, some have theorized that without Katrina, there would have probably been no Barack Obama who was a major beneficiary of post-Katrina anger that found its voice in the ballot box. 

Will the empathetic tears we are crying from the deaths of Parker and Ward be enough inspiration to get us thinking of a fix?  Some of us are hoping beyond hope that this is that moment for gun control and mental health care to converge and change America for the better.

No laughter. 

Deray McKesson: The New Face of Black Civil Rights

When a recent anonymous social media post started a complaint against todays black civil rights leaders- you know, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton- I quickly responded by telling Mr. Anonymous that those guys are former black civil rights leaders. If Bernie Sanders is looking for a voice to help him through his political challenge, he might want to employ the lead of the group that keeps challenging him.

Deray McKesson is the face and the most eloquent voice of the new black civil rights movement, BlackLivesMatter. As McKesson was arrested yesterday in Ferguson while questioning the arrest of an associate who joined him to film and tweet yesterday's protest live as it occurred, he noted that, "The police have weaponized blackness", pointing out the aggressive posture that they often take against black lives and black causes.

"You see a group of white men with actual weapons but no response to them", referring to a group called the Oath Keepers who are an anti-government militia that showed up with weapons yesterday near certain businesses, apparently to protect them from potential looters. 

Missouri law does allow for open carry but excludes the ability to point a weapon in an aggressive nature, though using them in a vigilante scenario might be a test of open carry laws that we've all been anxiously expecting, before and after George Zimmerman was acquitted for taking the life of Trayvon Martin.  The first case of vigilante groups killing a protester or a looter could test our social acceptance towards gun ownership much like crazed movie theather shooters have finally done.

In a two minute MSNBC interview, McKesson took aim at the absurdity of police with tainted vision towards blacks, open carry laws, the future of the movement and the necessity for recognition of how institutionalized these problems truly are, taking an encouraging dig at the agents invested in change who often grow weary and fall off over the long haul.

McKesson seems to be answering one of those divine calls.  He gave up a teaching career, took his savings and headed to Ferguson in the midst of the rioting to begin to teach in a whole new way.  If you are looking for the direction of this #blacklivesmatter thing, you should be listening and learning from the new face of the only black movement we've got.

Deray McKesson. Get to know him.

"Damaging a building is not the same as killing or hurting a human being."

"We don't have to condone the pain of people to understand them."

"Broken windows are not broken spines."  

"Freddie Gray will never return but the windows will."

#blacklivesmatter

Police Brutality. Only A Problem If We Talk About It

Whoever say's riots don't work is fooling themselves.

Riots start conversations.  Conversations start change.

They have worked for years.  Sometimes they work to get a bunch of people drunk from the looted liquor stores that often happen behind the peaceful backdrop of organized dissent. They have also worked on freeing some people to lash out at the looters instead of joining the protest against needless deaths at the hands of those we hire to serve and protect us.

Why Talk About A 
Problem That Doesn't Exist?

The behavior of the guilty is usually to first assign blame elsewhere.  This seemingly comes across as a smart and balanced response except that people only respond to matters that concern them.  If the senseless death of blacks at the hands of white cops is not a problem worthy of conversation, it is not a problem worthy of demeaning- especially by virtue of the actions of looters.

That thought came to mind for me while doing my best to ingest white guilt in the nature of distorted statistics designed to pretend that police brutality is a myth. One blogger say's that looting is a silly way to get people to listen to your message while the other says police kill and brutalize more whites than blacks, but none of the black people are complaining about white deaths via cop.

The best of them actually dared to ask me directly:

Baltimore riots are likely to expedite chest cams for cops.
Would it happen as fast without looting and burning?

"Why do blacks end up on the wrong side of the law?"

as if he had uncovered the underlying problem to the matter by smashing that tennis ball squarely on my side of the court, since I'm the black he expected to answer this question.

My Answer?:

I know you think you've asked the million dollar question, but you've only revealed why we don't want you to ever be a cop.  Your engrained belief is what many levy at police who assume blacks to be criminals as well.

Even if your statistics bear out, it doesn't mean a hill of beans to that family with an innocent person that is the victim of perception. Every American should be invested in the lives of innocent victims- not just those who share the same color.

This particular blogger, whom I often find myself at odds with, generated the initial post that challenged the value of burning and looting your own neighborhood.  In my initial response I totally agree with him on the foolishness of the behavior, yet, I can't help but notice that the foolishness becomes the topic and the topic falls to the background every time people employ their Constitutional right to protest against patterned behaviors of abuse. Does anyone recognize the peaceful crowd or is fire and mayhem the only way to insure the intense focus of the camera? The more we watch endless hours of the criminals who come out durings protests, all fingers are pointing towards a stronger impact from the Hennesey theives than the peaceful protesters.

For a while, every station felt compelled to place the heat on Hillary or show compassion in Nepal but nothing beats an opportunity to film that fat brother with his pants falling down while running with a hand full of new clothes.

This should be a wake up call for old school protesting that seems to be nothing more than the smokescreen that malcreants will use to benefit themselves.  These people don't start out in the peaceful protest and find themselves loading their trunks up with Hennesey.  They come out of their house in the hopes that some Hennesey shakes loose from all of this uproar.  If police can take some knowledge from the cycle, they would place a few cops, the elected officials and lots of public services like out-houses and free water and bouncey houses for the kids at the site of a protest, while the armed police proceed towards the business districts to quickly lock up every ass-hole that hopes to gain from another unexplained death. Unexplained means that protesters should not let a spotted history of policing allow them to automatically assume that every unexplained death was unnecessary per se. As for abhored whites who are embarrassed by the onslaught of video abuse, they need to remove their color and their guilt from the trail we are trying to track towards a solution.

One right leaning blogger tried to track a trail that explains the unrest in Baltimore in this way:

The first Democrat mayor of Baltimore was Nancy Pelosi’s brother.
He became mayor in 1967. They’ve had a Democrat in office since then.
How’s that working out? 

To which I responded:

The moment we attempt to free ourselves from the misplaced anger of our young people by pretending politics has something to do with America's deplorable history relative to racial issues, we don't actually point out the problem- we become it.

Yet, even those who misdirect their complaints are complaining their hearts out and revealing them as well.  Would we hear from guilty whites if not for the stupidity of looting? I think not.

Looting must work, otherwise we would see it regularly in the same neighborhoods instead of every several decades or more.  No one appreciates the result of looting and burning during a protest that was intended to be peaceful at the start.  In fact, they dislike it to the degree that they put their heads together towards avoiding its occurance in the future.  Some of the businesses that were burned in Baltimore recently, only came to Baltimore as a result of public brainstorming from interested parties. Those disgusted with the results of Baltimore's recent riot will have to determine if its been 50 years since the last one because of bad people and bad policing or good people and good policing?  

Would Mike Brown Jr. be alive today if he were white?

Mysteriously, every really bad police force in America with a history of a problem in the area of police brutality is one by one becoming exposed by video.  Those of us who understand the power of the spirit and the manner in which it brings us all to the end of our sinful ways find all of this to be far from mysterious and even further from over.

If This Is Not America's Problem, 

then it's not a problem at all.

WE will continue to see video ass-kicking or police murders that cause looting  until WE understand that we are all we got. There is no answer absent the brainstorming of everyone who cares to talk about it.  Once you no longer care to criticize the rioter's or stand by the protester's, then you are finally exempt from this problem.  

For the rest of US, we've got work to do.

I Support The Police Brutality Protesters...But I Stand With The Police

WE may not be too interested in running out to vote in high percentages during elections that a black man is not a presidential candidate on the ballot, but America is full of courageous and proud advocates for change.

Those young folks in Ferguson might be changing the world. At the least, the town of Ferguson will never be the same again and the rest of the world has taken notice.  Eric Garner triggered bi-partisan disgust, but even he only achieved this stature aided by a long history of police violence towards black men. WE know it is a problem, but due to laws that limit the reporting of such violence- and no video before Rodney King got caught on camera- all of America has been free to sweep their police violence dirt beneath a carpet.  Michael Brown Jr. could have become the villain that Darren Wilson supporters believe him to be, but a spray of bullets from Wilson's gun insured that his body alone would represent a dirty carpet that lives in every community of color.  When, at last, the carpet was pulled up from the filthy concrete, a cloud of dusty memories spread throughout a horrified world waiting in anticipation for a sign of something other than the same foggy feeling of injustice.

They are still waiting.

Within all of our confusion over who is most worthy of blame when black men lay dead in the streets at the hands of police, most agree to the presence of a problem and one that prisons are exacerbating, not curing.  Love 'em or hate 'em, the police officer unions are sworn to the protection of officers just as the officers are supposedly sworn to the protection of the communities they police.  In an increasingly violent society, the promise to be officers of peace has evolved into cops who promise Friends and Family that they will do everything they can to get home alive.

When the mission evolves from preserving the peace to getting home alive, trigger fingers grow itchy.  Nationwide, violent crime is on a sharp decline- just don't tell that to someone who was a recent victim.  They may be alive today because of a cop who answered the 911 call. But let's not get it twisted.  We pay taxes for the benefit of such things, so those who choose service careers do so with an understanding that society will find someone to do the job simply because it must.  Conflating the prevalence of black deaths by cops to nothing more than a Human Resource issue seems extremely simplistic, but is diversity hiring and/or diversity training the key to quieting the thousands of protesters around the world? As we work to change the face of policing, do we run the risk of running off good cops while starting a manhunt to remove bad ones? At what point do we put all lives in greater danger while protesting against the unreasonable deaths of  a few too many black men?

In principal, I stand with the cops because I know too many good ones to stand anywhere else, and standing on the other side of the man with the gun and an itchy trigger finger is how you get shot in the first place.  We live in a world full of racial distrust and ethnic biases.  These biases reveal themselves in all aspects of society so it seems peculiar that we don't expect these things in the realm of law enforcement as well.  The remedy for racially motivated killings by law enforcement is similar to the remedy for reducing the unusually high suspension rates for black kindergarten children versus white children of the same grade level.  Blacks represent too small a percentage of inhabitants in America to be so heavily incarcerated, or killed by cops, or suspended from kindergarten compared to other racial groups.

The Chain of Humanity is only as strong as its weakest link.
Lets focus on the chains that bind us together.

So what is the answer?

Faith and Family.  WE all have (or need) families and we mostly pray to the same God if we pray at all. The effectual, fervent prayer of like-minded people must come to bare if change is to occur. Things WE have in common are the only chains that bind us. In the end, WE will only be as strong as our weakest link, so our strength will come from the kind of Faith WE can share.  If blacks unnecessarily killed by cops are humanized by the tears of their mourning families, the cops must too be humanized by the tears of joy from the children who hug their policing parents when they survive another dangerous night of law enforcement.

In God WE trust?!  Through faith and family we live and thrive. 

God Bless America!

Was Big Mike Suppose To Be A Surgeon (or Michael, An Angel)?

I wish I could not relate so easily to young black men who find themselves in the predicament that Michael Brown Jr. found himself that fateful day he left to become Michael, an angel. 

I aint sayin’ he was an angel during his lifetime.  He was human, and he’s likely the kid on the video who "strong-armed" those cigarillos, which are cigars that are used for rolling blunts (marijuana joints rolled with cigar skins). 

Reasonable accounts have Michael Brown Jr. and Dorian Johnson stealin’ and thuggin’ the day Darren Wilson took Brown Jr's life.  It’s something I might have done myself on some level or another growing up in places that make you choose one path  versus the other.  I have certainly seen it live and in living color on many occasions.  For many inner city youth, you either follow those who are stealin’ and thuggin’ or you follow those who are mackin’ and hangin’.  I was not properly suited for either endeavor, so I avoided both and settled on the more traditional route of sports and school, but so did Michael Brown Jr.  To graduate high school means you shunned enough distractions to make it through. He did no less than any high school kid does in the end; he survived and got a diploma and was scheduled to continue his education.

And then the real tug-o-war began.

The world is a scary place and life will be challenging under the best of circumstances.  Every hood in America is basically the same. On one corner they are mackin’ and hangin’ and on the other they are stealin’ and thuggin'. Young black men who live in really tough areas have a duty to insure that they maintain a tough exterior, even if they would prefer to only do the mackin’ and hangin’ instead of the stealin' and thuggin' that Michael Brown Jr. looked to be doing just before he was shot down in the street.  Black men who reject both directions learn how to play act either role for survival sake. If the streets know you are aspiring to do more than these hopeless endeavors, the streets will make every attempt to keep you near.

There simply is no way to question the obvious fear that America has for black men, especially young and dark and big like Michael Brown Jr.  Black men fear one another too.  Turns out that growing up as a young black man is so difficult, you never know who is handling the task very well, so you have to be ready to deal with an angry black man at all times....especially if you are one.  WE understand black male fear because WE live in it.

The oddest part about facing a scary world is that some folks decide it’s easier to be scary instead of scared.  On some level or another, we all assume this survival posture in life, but few of us do it in such a way to incite felony convictions or gunfire. If you are an inner city black man, avoiding felony convictions or gunfire is a magic trick of sorts. It’s not impossible to pull off, but demands more energy than anybody who is not a black man quite understands. Growing up naturally insures mistakes. A world that is inclined to see you as a villain is apt to think you are doing something wrong, even when you're not. People who prefer to label only work to prove themselves right. Incarceration trends have not matched crime for 40 years.

This story demands speculation and it is often unfair to do much speculation, but Michael Brown Jr., much like Trayvon Martin, has risen above his own name and become the symbol of what many poor American’s have said about bad cops for years.  Seldom, if ever, are bad cops convicted for the crimes they commit against regular citizens, so to expect differently is foolish.  Darren Wilson will likely walk, or he will be given a charge of manslaughter and suspended jail time that won’t satisfy the angry.  If he actually goes down for Murder 2 and see's real time, this statue becomes a  monument that is higher and more significant than any of us have seen thus far in this age-old debate.

Michael Brown Jr. is the new and improved Trayvon Martin because the evidence, especially witnesses, have elevated this beyond simple supposition.  This is probability at its finest, and it is probable that we will have all of the pertinent facts necessary to achieve a necessary conviction…….yet we still must preserve the sanctity of policing by not trying to heap years of oppression onto the back of Darren Wilson.

We (I’m talking to my black folk now) should prepare ourselves for the necessity of leniency. On that special day when the police force becomes 67% black in Ferguson because the city is 67% black, those 67% will be YOUR friends and family members burdened with the challenge of policing desperate populations in their area.  One day the news report is of the lost life of a citizen, and tomorrow it is the lost life of an off duty police officer who stepped in to calm young folks who decided thuggin’ at a Jazz festival in Denver City park is a great way to flex your muscle. Not at all the same topic, but young black men are dying at the hand of a lot of bullets and the residual casualties are making the whole issue harder to ignore.

Michael Brown Jr. should have never lost his life, but neither should have Celena Hollis of the Denver police force. I only mention her because when I think of anger towards police, I remember Celena Hollis and her family.  Darren Wilson has a family too.

Is one death more emblematic of a bigger societal problem? Probably!

Yet, if we cause the best of our society to stop sacrificing themselves to the demands of law enforcement, what kind of new societal problem will we experience?  Police are something nobody seems to like except everybody that needs one.  I can only imagine how frustrating these days must be to the good cops of Ferguson; having to listen to the anger of some the same people they had to rescue prior to the death of Michael Brown Jr.

I am not an advocate of disrupting the sanctity of policing, not even for Michael Brown Jr.  The spirit tells me that we won’t have to because Michael Brown Jr., like Trayvon Martin is a flash point to a greater, long overdue discussion.  Our angels for change. Michael Brown Jr. told his grandpa that the world would know him one day, and he was right.

SquareBiz stands committed to this discussion and all of America’s important conversations that we have yet to seriously start or sensibly finish.  Rodney King was the first of this kind; modern day police brutality caught on camera.  While we do not have actual footage of the Brown Jr. shooting,  eye witness and forensic evidence caused nearly two weeks of street protests and rare federal oversight.  Fortunately for Rodney, he lived and L.A. recovered from the destruction it experienced when the cops got off.  Unfortunately for America, the discussion did not live, as it only revealed how opposed many of us were over the latitude we believe policing demands and how this flexibility has disproportionately smacked the hell out of brown skinned people. Quickly, we retreated into our respective corners only to pretend that this was not a fight worth having. After all, Rodney lived.  

Michael Brown Jr. did not live, but will his memory die as well?

We have had our head violently yanked from the sand on this one, but despite oxygen deprivation, it seems we often prefer to shove our head back where it came.  Eyewitness testimony may be inspiring the black president and his black Attorney General to move with haste, but the Ferguson mayor, Missouri governor and every presidential candidate who could be forced to oversee America’s future conversations on race have been slow and silent, much like racial progress. It’s rather easy to alter the face of racism by turning your back on it, but in doing so, you have done little to affect historical change and nothing to lead the change that’s needed today. If leaders chose only to speak on the importance of respecting our good cops during these angered moments, that would have value. Silence is a message of another kind.

If we slap a chest camera on every officer in America is that the license to continue the silent delusion that community policing was not the solution to begin with?  Cities that have implemented chest cam’s have seen up to 80% reductions in violent policing, but have they seen a change in attitude? Integrating will help, but does that ultimately mean more cops, of whatever color, and more jails?  Breaking the tragic cycles of life and prejudice that result in incarceration (or death by cop) should be the greater goals that we look to gain from the senseless loss of another young black man, but even that places the wrong focus on this issue.  Michael Brown Jr., good, bad or in between should not have been shot that day, so the idea of mentoring, as suggested by the president’s My Brother’s Keeper comments, lends itself to the notion that mentoring could have saved the life of Michael Brown Jr. Six foot four, big black and scary, Michael  Brown Jr. needed a cop who saw his own son, and not some menace to society. America needs this too.

If Wilson killed Brown Jr. without knowing about the video............ (Why do we have this video in the first place?)

What mentoring could have done is offered a summer program for college credit that Brown Jr. could have been attending instead of stealin’ and thuggin’, and walking in the middle of the street to go do some mackin’ and hangin'. Seeing a non-athletic, scary black man in college is a visual mentoring of its own kind.  In this case, mentoring could have only forced this awful plight on some other black family, at a different time and place, to watch their loved one become the poster child for police brutality run amok. At the rate of death to young black men by insensitive white cops, this day was inevitable, which also means that some other innocent family of the killer cop would be dealing with whatever the family of Darren Wilson is dealing with in St. Louis. God Bless both families during this trying time. 

I know that my white neighbor, the surgeon, did not call it stealin’ and thuggin’ when he too behaved like Michael Brown Jr. as a kid, despite a much more privileged life than Brown Jr., but he always shakes his head when he thinks about how awful, and how fortunate he was given his travails while coming of age. Imagine the outcry if he'd been killed by police while doing some of the same stuff black kids die for all of the time?

Which lead me to wonder. Could Big Mike have become a world famous surgeon, or was he always destined to be an angel named Mike?  

The Question Still Remains. WHY DO WE HAVE THIS REPORT?

As the conspiracy theories mount regarding this bizarre series of events, try this one on for size.

This portion of the convenience store theft report (see below) was amended by the officer who took over this case the Monday following the killing of Mike Brown (2 days later).  First question is, why does anyone need to take over the cigarillo case which is listed as a 48.99 loss to the convenience store, but no names of the convenience store workers or notes saying they would pursue this crime. This case should have been shut before it needed to be open, not reassigned so that multiple statements could be entered for a case that died the minute the victim refused to press charges.

The bigger concern is why would the confirmation of the two individuals names be added to an incident that the merchant didn't care to pursue, and since the names were clearly added on Monday by the newly assigned cop on this case, why did this newly assigned cop need to officially name the cigarillo suspects?  The original officer did not include these names.  This eyewitness of Browns dead corpse could have been made by the merchants who are the only people who laid real eyes on the thief.  Apparently, this newly assigned cop has better vision when it comes to turning unknown perpetrators into confirmed dead people by video imaging alone.  As you read this report, it seems as though Johnson is added simply from his televised interviews and not from him admitting to a crime that the video would have cornered him on anyway. Why couldn't they simply force Johnson to admit his involvement in the video taped crime.  BECAUSE THE CASE SHOULD HAVE BEEN CLOSED, since the merchant refused to testify, yet notes are continuously being added.

LINK TO THE FULL REPORT

After all of that minor madness, there still is this question of the statement that you see above and the one contradicting it made by the Ferguson police chief.  This Monday morning addendum says that "It is worth mentioning that this incident is related to another..." The chief of Ferguson now says it was NOT related  because Darren Wilson (the shooter), had no clue about the cigarillo theft. Yes, its worth mentioning this report so long as you release the incident reports that you are referring to.  As of now, they have yet to release the only report/s that matters in the death of Mike Brown and the only report that has been requested. Yet, we have mass proliferation of a strong arm theft report with several addendum notes made for nearly a week, before you give us what actually we asked for?  How many times do you need to reword a totally unrelated petty theft that was exceptionally cleared by a non-pursuant merchant  before it was permanently expunged by the death of the key suspect; which made any additional notes on this theft, especially his name, unnecessary  and impossible to prove anyway

Darren Wilson had no clue Big Mike was stealing, nor did America until the chief insisted we read this report.  However, this report directly mentions the only reports that we've been asking for in the first place. Wilson may not have known about this almost meaningless report before he shot Brown, but he better love it like a Bible right now. This report is possibly the report that keeps Darren Wilson from doing life in prison, because in Missouri, there will be less punishment for killing a strong arming cigarillo thief.

Now.  Can we get those other two reports.....please?

Even Eyewitness Testimony Can't Stop Incidents Of Bad Policing

Whenever we get another one of these unarmed black men killed by a cop, we lose a lot of rubber as we spin our wheels in the street trying to find the balance between trusting the men and women we depend on to serve and protect us, while the unavoidable truth is that no one can ever hire perfectly for any job.

Occasionally, police departments hire guys (sorry fellas, but its rarely ladies making these errors in judgement) that love weapons more than they love law enforcement or dislike minorities more than they love justice.  In certain toxic instances, they hire men with all of these traits.  There is probably no easy way to avoid these leaks in the system, and police unions become unfortunate shields for the worst of law enforcement's hiring mistakes.

It would be easy to chalk up the lost lives that will always come from the imperfect process of hiring, but the issue is bigger than Mike Brown from Ferguson or Eric Garner from New York.  I could Google names for hours of young black men that have died at the hand of law enforcement. Even worse, are the many nameless faces that never made it to the news; those forgotten ones that inspired certain residents of Ferguson, Missouri to loot a shoe store.

I know.  Retribution is a funny thing, but so is this unbreakable fear that America has of black men.  Especially young black men that embrace the entirety of hip-hop culture and go by the name Big Mike.  When Big Mike was alive, his 18 years of maturity was easily mistakable for grown man dangerous.  They called the kid Big Mike for a reason.  Apparently, the homicide of Big Mike took place in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri similar to most suburbs of America.  These are the places in America where whites, who can afford it, run away from the places where too many non-whites start to inhabit.  It would be nice if I could characterize it in some way that doesn't sound so disparaging of those who run towards the suburbs. The truth is, anywhere you see a suburban area that is not predominantly white, it is usually the old suburban area that whites have long since abandoned in mass.  Areas like Ferguson, Missouri, where Big Mike took his last breath on earth, or Aurora, Colorado, where I spent my middle school and high school years.

The Denver Metro is a cluster of old school suburbs that evolved from  the main city. Instead of building neighborhoods that distanced themselves from the main city like they do with modern suburbs, metro area neighborhoods  like Denver, extend from the main city by design.  People in Colorado love Denver, even those that choose to live outside of its most active inner circle.  Aurora is one of the first of these offshoot cities with a vibrant history of military bases that anchored the city during its rise.  Lowry Air Force base was a key central part of Aurora before a recent  redevelopment and on the outskirts of the military base are several pockets of housing that offered various price ranges to the military families that occupied the area.

Directly across the street from the base is an upper crust slice of neighborhood that was said to be commonly owned by the officers.  The houses are noticeably nicer than all the others in the area, and only a few people we knew actually lived in these houses.  One of them was one of my closest friends.  His dad was an Air Force officer so he was fortunate to have a house inside of this little slice of heaven. Somehow, when I think back to my Mike Brown moments in history, it always seemed to be with this particular friend of mine, who was every bit as black and as nerdy as me, if not more so.

He was the military family kid that lived on the nicer side of the street. There were a few other black kids that lived in the same area, but they were lighter skinned black kids of mixed race.   When we first got confronted by questionable policing, it was in this 6 block neighborhood where my friend lived. The shakedown  was the basic 'what are you doing in this nice area' kind of shakedown, but a shakedown no less. This might have been one of the last pieces of white sanctity nestled inside of the rough edges of north Aurora, but it was nestled, not isolated like a true suburb.  Shakedowns in other parts of Aurora were very prevalent at the time.   Aurora, once the suburban refuge to neighboring Denver, had begun to lose all of its non-minorities to South Aurora and other areas not called Denver or North Aurora.  Unfortunately, the staffing of Aurora police officers in the 80's is much like that of Ferguson, Missouri today, not reflective of the community that it attempted to serve.

We were two blocks away from his home, probably walking back from hooping on the military base.  Colorado had finally given in to the lottery ticket craze and someone had discarded a loser on the sidewalk along our route home. 30 seconds after we picked up that ticket, a police car pulls up to us and stops us to ask us what we were doing in the area.  The answer of heading home didn't fit the pre-planned agenda for this stop, so he proceeded to take down names and check for warrants.  The few black dudes that lived on the outskirts of this small community probably did have warrants, so his shake of the dice had a reasonable expectation of luck.  When he crapped out so quickly on two high school nerds that actually did live nearby, he was none too happy that I requested his name, badge number and a reason for the stop.  As I recall, he accused us of littering (the lotto ticket was a loser remember) and made sure we never got the rest of that information.

The next time I got a police shake down, I was a sophomore in high school and responsible for pulling off the Sadie Hawkins (girls ask the guys) dance for our class.  While dressed in shirt and tie, myself and that same friend of mine and another young black gentleman in a shirt and tie, had to move the school soft drink machine into the gym for the dance.  I guess there could have been three black burglars in shirt and tie trying to steal a soft drink machine behind a well populated school, with no get away car just as the cop suspected of us.  The white students who were holding open the door for us came quickly to declare that they were pointing guns at the sophomore class president and his most likely to succeed friends, but even the teacher that soon arrived could not digress this overly aggressive act of policing.

The first incident occurred in broad daylight, but the latter was in the dark, backside of the school gym.  From the street view, I respect that this cop might have thought that he had unveiled something nefarious.  Whether he really had a call about someone matching our descriptions or simply used it to quell the embarrassment of the moment is hardly of a concern to me.  In the process of trying to keep people safe, innocent people occasionally endure shake downs (see; airport travel).  My concern is for the unbridled passion at which this officer went about his business.  When police officers regularly treat innocent people as guilty until proven otherwise, they eventually end up with fatal errors in judgement.

To the credit of old school cops, they were more likely to beat young blacks down and leave them to get home on their own instead of shooting them dead.  Now, gun culture and the prevalence of guns creates hypersensitive cops that trust the laws to acquit them against shootings more than they trust the people they are sworn to serve and protect.

Will chest camera's  improve police accountability?

Where do these quick triggered tendancies come from?  Lack of diversity in leadership positions, especially in communities where diversity represents the community at large. These environments demand leaders who reject typical hiring behaviors to insure that diversity, of gender and ethnicity, becomes a priority of leadership itself.  Diverse hiring within diverse communities is a central component for what defines good leadership. White cops, educators, judges....leaders, will never develop minority sensitivity running from intimate minority interaction like working side by side with them every day.  In fact, hiring black officers to police their own neighborhoods seems to be the loudest bone of contention from the more controlled of the angry Ferguson protesters.  Must we always use tragedy to foster the changes that are abundantly apparent long before the tragedy occurs? As we speak, Ferguson police officials seem focused on discrediting the eye witness accounts which drastically differ from the statement of the officer who pulled the trigger in this death (his name has yet to be released in fear for his safety).

In  the wake of the choking death of Eric Garner in New York, NYC, public advocate Letitia A. "Tish" James, is leading a change that includes police with video cameras abreast.  While some cops clearly hate the idea, others, especially those who've  been involved in justified shootings, see this as a way of clearing the name of good cops who get illegally targeted while justifiably performing in the line of duty.

I can hear all of you privacy advocates screaming in the background.    Do chest camera's further exacerbate  our limited privacy? The answer to that question is rather easy.  Integrate or video tape.  The choice is yours.