Where will it all end?

By Brad Franklin
0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, November 27, 2014
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Protesters gather on the steps of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington on Tuesday, November 25. A grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in the August shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has prompted demonstrations across the country.



Like many other people, I was surprised that the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, did not bring an indictment against police officer Darren Wilson. The grand jury certainly had much more information about what happened when Wilson, a white cop, shot and killed Michael Brown, a young black man, last August than had been made public. Its decision that Wilson acted lawfully was always one possible outcome but it was still a surprise, at least to me, and a trigger to many of the people in Ferguson. To say the town erupted is an understatement, and it shows the deep mistrust and fear that is pervasive in America. Anyone who thinks that racism there ended with the civil rights movement of the last century and the laws against discrimination is woefully misinformed.

The grand jury decision was made known to Brown's family before it was released to the public. They were extremely disappointed but they called for calm. They knew some people would protest in the streets and accepted that but they asked, in their grief, that the protesters parade peacefully. That didn't happen. Following the announcement of the Jury's decision Ferguson was the epicentre of mayhem. A beauty shop, a pizzeria and a Laundromat were among the downtown buildings burned to the ground. A police car was doused in a flammable fluid and set on fire in the middle of a street. Fire trucks couldn't reach the conflagrations because of the unruly crowds and at a news conference in the small hours of the next morning the police said they had been shot at 150 times during the night. I doubt that. Americans have a ridiculous love affair with guns, so it's a little curious that 150 shots were fired at police officers and no one was hit. Regardless, in a town in which the police, the fire department and the National Guard were braced knowing trouble was coming, the violence was an ugly reminder that racism is alive and well in the United States. Other, lesser, protests erupted in other cities across the country.

To some degree the Americans are doing this to themselves. While Brown's mother and father appealed for calm his stepfather went before the television cameras screaming for people to "burn this s**t down." He was hurt and he was deeply frustrated but he was also clearly wrong in trying to incite people to violence. As a person very directly involved, his outburst might be at least somewhat understandable. Less clear was the abject stupidity of the Tea Party, a right-wing splinter of the country's Republican Party, which used its website to make fun of Michael Brown's father. The father, also named Michael, had been producing and selling T-shirts as a fund raiser to help pay some of the family's expenses but the shirts had a typographical error and the Tea Party, apparently not caring anything for the man's sensitivities, mocked him for it. One might think that having had his son shot was bad enough without that and the Tea Party should be ashamed.

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