I am seeing so much divisive finger pointing on the Internet where people of differing opinions accuse each other of nefarious conspiracies. If you are a liberal, those conspiracies are headed up by the Koch brothers. If you are a conservative those conspiracies are headed up by George Soros. Also, everyone is suddenly Hitler or a Nazi, if you don’t agree with them.
Unproven malicious gossip is taken as true. Mainstream media is drowned out, because people can’t afford subscriptions — or the time to read a paid subscription.
And, into this maelstrom, comes the current crisis surrounding the killing of Afrimericans by white cops and the shooting of cops by a loony in Dallas.
I tend to think of myself as progressive. I tend to take those views in many respects.
There’s this liberal cartoon
All Houses Matter: The Updated Version @krisstraub pic.twitter.com/PJ9gd5qGd3— Mikey Neumann (@mikeyface) July 7, 2016
Then there's this conservative cartoon
I do find a certain appeal to the conservative cartoon. An Afrimerican "friend" on FB accused me of sounding like a Nazi when I said there were some cultural issues about the difference between how Afrimericans respond to police and how Anglos do. I don't think that this is a legal issue exactly, unlike the author of the above cartoon.
Now these latest two shooting by cops did not show Afrimericans responding non-deferentially to cops. But some of the earlier ones did.
Please note I'm not saying that the anger management issues that cops have manifested in response to non-deferential behavior were justified. I think cops should be trained not to respond to perceived rudeness with rage. I think cops should be more professional than that. On the other hand, it just really isn't prudent to be rude or talk back to a cop. It just isn't.
I do feel that Anglos like me (actually I'm only half Anglo) tend to be more timid and deferential in general. I've even heard Afrimericans comment on that.
Let me give you a couple of examples out of my life.
The first example occurred when my son was in second grade.
I live in a school district that is about half Hispanic and half white, but there are very few African Americans, as we usually think about that term, tho the Hispanics often have some African ancestry. I went to my son’s class and witnessed an African American boy put out in the hall. He had been talking back to the teacher and would not stop.
Now the curious thing about this was that this boy was not being nasty or disrespectful. He was just talking to her pleasantly, as if they were in an ordinary conversation, ignoring the rest of the class. I didn’t think he was a bad kid at all, but somehow his behavior was not like that of the other kids — all of whom listened silently when the teacher spoke.
I felt that this was perhaps a cultural difference. I notice, for instance, that Afrimericans are allowed to talk back in church, while Anglos are not supposed to.
The second example happened to me in NYC.
I was walking along 34th street at night with a man I had just met at an event. My companion was a very small, nerdy white man. As we walked along, we encountered a rather seedy looking street preacher, also white, who was saying something about Christianity. I’m not quite sure what he was saying, but the fellow I was walking with chose to try to speak to the preacher. I don’t remember what the comment was, but the street preacher went ballistic, showing himself to be dangerously unhinged.
The fellow I was walking with and I chose to try to walk briskly away from this lunatic, but he was screaming after us and seemed like he might try to follow us, which was a bit alarming.
Another pedestrian went over and yelled at the lunatic and told him to quit bothering us. This pedestrian was African American. His intervention did seem to work as the lunatic stopped yelling at us.
On the one hand, I was grateful to the person who intervened to help us and thanked him. On the other hand, I felt that this intervention might easily have backfired and resulted in a violent incident, and I doubted that an Anglo would have intervened in the same way.
In any case, I'm thinking that it might be good if school children were trained in how to respond to police, so that there would be consistency. That might avoid some problems. If everyone behaved consistently, the police might more easily distinguish people who were truly resisting arrest and dangerous from others.
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