LA VOICES DIVIDED ON THE ROAD TO JUSTICE--Bulletin to those who love to march and decry "those people" (you know, "those people" being the police) with sweet mental visions of themselves being the next generation of freedom fighters and civil rights advocates: YOU'RE NOT. You're not the modern-day version of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony, or any other civil rights icon--in fact you ARE the problem to overcome.
You know..."The Man". The threatening force to overcome. The out-of-touch, regressive, backwards, living-in-the-past, problem that modern-day society needs to shuck off and put in yesterday's historical garbage bin.
Or maybe you're just a tool, a fool or a cruel--not the "new wave" of civil rights activists, as you fashion yourselves with the sweet dreams of a new 1960's era dancing in your little heads, but just troublemakers.
Or perhaps you're just spoiled, privileged and naive supporters of these troublemakers whom you support for ... what psychological issue or mental health problem is it, now?
Even the real civil rights heroes--and they ARE heroes, recognized as true Americans by all sensible citizens who've ever picked up and read a textbook or read a newspaper--have called out the troublemakers.
And troublemakers you are, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, with real and honest black and other civil rights leaders in agony over watching their once-venerable cause go awry in the worst possible way. Shout down Mayor Garcetti as a way to get yourself heard? Really, now?
There ARE rogue cops who deserve to be thrown off the police force (or even imprisoned) for what they've done. There ARE benefits for having the citizenry of all ethnicities and neighborhoods on the sides of the police, with both diminished crime and enhanced economic opportunities for all parties concerned.
One can be both pro-police and pro-civil rights. But let's cut the nonsense:
"Black Lives Matter" isn't going to fix the problem...they ARE the problem. As much the problem, to be sure, as any marchers who adhere to the KKK cause. Black lives DO matter, and blue lives DO matter--but shutting down freeways and public venues and lionizing (of all people) the bullyboy thug Michael Brown of Ferguson?
Frankly, any moral and God-fearing civil rights fighter would run, not walk, from any crowd that chanted "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon!" and instead start demanding that crowds start chanting the names of every innocent black and brown child and young adult gunned down for no rational reason in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and every other major city that purports to be "enlightened" and "pro-civil rights".
Each black, brown or any other American gunned down for being in "the wrong neighborhood" or being caught in horrific crossfire from out-of-control gang warfare is an unspeakable tragedy: each of those Americans had first and last names, families, and futures that were ripped away from them.
So if naive, perhaps self-loathing and guilty director Quentin Tarantino (who got rich and famous depicting more glorified violence, more romanticized deaths of black gangsters, more diminished cost of black lives with the N-word thrown about with reckless abandon) wants to call police murderers, maybe the police are right to call for a boycott of Tarantino's upcoming movie "The Hateful Eight".
Because Tarantino looks pretty "hateful" himself right now--even his father, who must be agony over his son's idiocy, opposes the director's recent statements and positions.
Hey, Quentin--I know you're trying to show that you're one of the good guys, but remember those old-fashioned movies you studied when the cops were the good guys?
Guess what: they still are! Even the black cop who got killed in the line of duty while you were somehow expunging your own guilt and siding with the troublemakers in New York. These troublemakers are likely to get MORE black cops killed, and MORE black children killed as the police back off from doing their job for fear of legal retribution (as we now see in Baltimore and all over this nation).
And that video we saw of the police officer dragging that troublemaking kid out of her chair in South Carolina as she was shutting down the class and even punched him? Certainly the question of that tactic is fair play--but would any of us question that something bad would happen to us or our children if we punched a police officer? Isn't that a question that's fair play, too?
But HERE is something that is also fair play: the school's student population supports the police officer, and wants him reinstated (LINK: http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/459305-the-media-blasted-cop-for-slamming-student-onto-table-what-the-rest-of-the-school-just-did-shows-a-different-story/). Those students--many of them black--have lives (and opinions!) that matter, too.
Even politically incorrect talk show host Bill Maher gets it: bad parenting leads to upsetting events such as that described above in South Carolina.
And while our President would probably admit he helped this nation get into this quagmire as much as our last President would admit he got us into a quagmire in Iraq, we are in a quagmire. Neither our President nor any true civil rights leader would want the police to be so much on the defensive that they would be afraid to do their jobs ...
... but we ARE in a quagmire. Make no bones about it.
And if we don't keep our eye on the real civil rights problems of our times--decreased economic and educational opportunities for inner city youth, heightened stereotypes because of our current quagmire of a divided America--an explosion of deaths of black and brown youths and children--we'll discover one new problem:
We'll discover the dangerous reality of what happens when the police don't want to go to certain neighborhoods to answer calls for help ... and those neighborhoods will have to learn to fend for themselves.
And then the real civil rights violations of loss of property, speech and life will really begin.
(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also does regular commentary on the Mark Isler Radio Show on AM 870, and co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 89
Pub: Nov 3, 2015
