I think my brain has turned itself upside down. Have you read the news over the past couple of days? The current Current Events are enough to make you crazy.
In the first place, I must confess that I have thought the flap over white cops shooting black men has been strenuously overblown. Puh-leeeze! If you decide to knock over a convenience store and rough up a clerk and challenge a cop who comes after you, you can’t be surprised when you get shot, no matter what your racial persuasion. And you might want to think about the potential risks before you let your kid go outside and wave a convincingly realistic-looking toy gun around a public park. But what happened in South Carolina yesterday raises some real questions about that line of thinking.
In case you haven’t pulled your head out from under the pillow this morning: a police officer stopped a driver because one of the driver’s tail lights was out. An altercation ensued in which the officer tased the driver, who turned and ran off. The officer fired eight shots, at least one of which hit the man in the back and killed him. The officer happened to be white; the driver happened to be black.
The officer claims he felt his life was threatened. Exactly how a man who’s fleeing you at a dead run, with his back turned to you and with no gun in his hand, could be much of a threat…that remains unexplained. Was the man a threat to public safety? Well…a healthy and vigorous adult male human being can wreak a fair amount of mayhem without benefit of any kind of armament. But lacking a gun and lacking any reason to beat up on anyone: one wonders.
So…we killed this guy because he ran away (his brother claims he probably was afraid of going to jail for failing to pay child support) after we stopped him over a tail light???
We stopped him over a dead tail light? Really? Seriously?
Let me ask you, my white brethren and sistern, how often has a police officer passed his time arresting you because one (count it, 1) of your tail lights was not working? As you know, I drive a junker. Just the other day when I took the Dog Chariot in for some maintenance work, WonderMechanic’s guys changed a tail light that they noticed was out. I knew the plastic cover was cracked — has been for quite some time (as in months and months) — but was trying to pretend I didn’t know the light was out. I pass quite a few of Arizona’s Finest as I make my way over the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Nary a one of them has even turned a hair at the blank tail light, much less tried to shoot me over it.
Maybe the rattletrap cars of elderly white women are less of a threat to public safety than the rattletrap cars of middle-aged black men?
Funny makes a sharp left turn.
Let us pour another cup of coffee and turn the page. Along about page 18, we come upon this blood-roiling headline:
Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Death of Family of 8
Dayum! That evil utility company!
The story of the man who poisoned himself and his seven kids by running an electric generator indoors has been framed in this way repeatedly: about 95 percent of the reports I’ve read imply that the cruel utility company cut off the family’s power and left them to die in the cold cold Maryland springtime.
As it develops, however, the victim had never even requested electric power service to the rental home. They moved in there last November — five months ago — and never ran up a dime’s worth of (legal) electric bills. Not, we learn, because the generator powered the home’s heater through the winter, but because Dad was an accomplished thief. He had stolen an electric meter, hooked it up on the QT, and was ripping off power from the utility company. Evidently he couldn’t afford power bills because he was trying to support seven children on minimum wage.
One of the conservative themes that I find especially revolting in the 21st-century national conversation is the idea that if you’re poor, it’s all your fault: poor people are, in this train of thought, lazy no-good bums who refuse to get off their duffs, and they deserve to live in poverty.
But… It’s very hard to push away the unkind question: what would possess you to have seven children if all you can earn is minimum wage? Minimum wage in this country isn’t enough to support one person, much less eight people. What part of birth control do you not understand? Does your zipper fall down on its own?
One of the deceased father’s friends asked “How can a man survive off of basically minimum wage with seven kids, and you can’t help him with a utility bill?”
It is not in any way self-evident that a utility company should donate support for the vast brood spawned by a man who can’t keep a grip on his procreative urges. Avoiding pregnancy is just not that hard.
No, it’s not the kids’ fault that they were born. It’s the fault — and the responsibility — of only two people: their parents.
Funny veers to the right.
Craziness to the left of us. Craziness to the right of us. We live in a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
So it goes…
You said it, Funny, and you said it very well.
Well I live in the “Free State” where nothing is free….About the folks that perished in Maryland… truly a terrible thing. BUT here’s what is crazy…Not so long ago I had an electric meter stole right off the side of one of my rental houses that was unoccupied and for rent. I went down on a Saturday to show it and …”no juice”…looked around the side and …gone. So I had to basically beg the BGE CSR to help me as it was 10 degrees and with no electric there is no heat…and it was Saturday. So I got to wait in an unheated rental unit for 4.5 hours for a tech to show up…So if this guy stole a meter to heat his home…..not a fan….It took a week for my feet to thaw out! In addition there is plenty of assistance available on the State, Federal, County and Faith-based levels….I see it all the time in the rental biz. BUT if you have drug problems or outstanding problems with law enforcement they need to be taken care of first. Aaaaand what the heck was he doing with a generator IN the house? Propane heaters are every where and can be very efficient. These heaters are used for camping and construction…A 16# propane bottle is $14 and some change at WalMart ….a generator at least $500….makes no sense. Sadly the kids had to pay the price…
Dollars to donuts he stole the generator, too.
Oh sh!t…that was unkind. Probably he bought it off Craig’s List from somebody who already figured out it had the potential to kill and just wanted to get rid of it cheap.
Around here, in apartment houses what the sh!theads do is wire their meter into a neighbor’s, thereby charging their use to the neighbor. At the “luxury” two-bedroom apartment I rented shortly after my divorce, the monthly power bill was as high as my power bill here, 20 years later in a four-bedroom house with a pool, even though I only spent two or three days a month in the apartment. What ARE we to make of that? 😉
I agree, I am not sure how a man fleeing makes one fear for their life. I feel badly for both families. I was just thinking that maybe a college degree is not as good as the trouble-maker turned cop, which was more the case during my parents lifetime and quite often in my youth. I also am thankful my sons chose not to go into law enforcement or fire fighting.
However – yes, I and just about everyone in my family has been stopped for a broken taillight, including my now deceased parents at some point. Maybe that just depends on where you live
I find craziness on both sides of the political aisles.
Ah hah! Sounds like a family of career criminals! 🙄
Yeah, it’s beginning to feel like we’re surrounded by craziness, whichever way we turn! Is this an illusion of old age, or is it objective fact?
Both firefighting and law enforcement seem pretty risky. However, people I’ve known who became firefighters have been satisfied with their careers, indeed often will say they loved it. Don’t know enough police officers well enough to ask that type of nosy question, so it’s hard to compare.
That’s us career criminals LOL. I hate all those little lights you can’t see on your car!
I would prefer to think it is an illusion of old age, rather than fact. But somewhere along the line, I remember walking on a street and hearing some teens using the f word, and I realized that I was fearful of their response if I said something. I’m wondering if the pendulum will start swinging the other way.
The people I’ve know who were firefighters are like those you knew and happy with their jobs, so were those who were police – but some police seem like just plain nicer people. One of my sons was an MP and was told by a local policeman that there was too much political bs in policing these days that made it less fulfilling.
On the other hand at the rate the world is going I’m curious to see if schools start the bomb drills again.
I’ll just enjoy the grandkids, kids, and hubby and try to get out and enjoy the fresh air!
I was pulled over at about 11 pm the other night for a broken license plate light (loose bulb, actually). Sat there for about 15 minutes will they took my license and did [something]. No ticket, but was polite and non-threatening.
Holy mackerel! NOT a darkened license plate??!? I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
LOL! It is nice, though, if an officer takes the time to clue you that something you can’t see and aren’t ever likely to notice isn’t working.
The other day I drove into the post office parking lot behind a lady. Her turn and brake signals weren’t working. She was happy when I let her know.
When you first referred to Kurt Vonnegut, I thought he was one of those bizarre Scandinavian authors, whose particular genre of crime noir is just too awful for me pollute my gentle soul. I account for the awfulness of these books (which border on ill-disguised misogyny: Steig Laarson et al) as a consequence of the quality of light at such Northern Latitudes : the endless day / endless night screws up your bio-rhythms & your soul. However, then I checked out Kurt & realised he was made in the USA. I don’t think we can blame the circadian rhythms for the warped reality you are describing in your geographic location. Detach from the news channels for awhile and enjoy the company of friends. When the global is too awful to contemplate, concentrating on local blessings gets me through.
Ah hah! I just found this — sorry not to have “Approved” it earlier.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the great U.S. writers of the twentieth century. If you haven’t read him yet, you should start with Cat’s Cradle, which IMHO is one of the funniest things that has been written since Mark Twain’s day. Slaughterhouse Nine, not funny at all, is one of the best novels written in and about the twentieth century.
🙂 I don’t have a television and so can’t watch news channels. {sigh}
I’m behind on my RSS feed, but you might find this article interesting. It talks about the different kinds of traffic stops and why they are different experiences for blacks and whites.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/04/north_charleston_shooting_how_investigatory_traffic_stops_unfairly_affect.html
What a shame!
Don’t know if the observations in the Slate article are straight-on accurate or not, but it certainly is true that my black and Latina friends are very nervous — even frightened — at the prospect of being stopped by a traffic cop, and that feeling seems to be based on experience.