By Mike Scinto
As seen in
The Civitas Media Newspapers Group
Prior to this month had I asked you about Ferguson,
Missouri I’d be willing to bet most of you would have to whip out your
smartphone and Google it. Today you’d likely to be able to tell me it is (or
was) a suburb of St. Louis. I used “was” because much of that community has
been battered after rioting over the deadly shooting, by police, of 22 year old
Michael Brown.
There’s always a danger with a columnist commenting
on an ongoing story that’s as fluid as this one because by the time you’re
opening the newspaper at your dinner table, or reading it on-line, things could
change. But what I’m addressing with this column is something that hasn’t
changed since I was a young boy in Memphis in the 1960s; and I’m convinced now may
never change in America.
I’ve yet to understand why, when a black American is
shot or restrained by the police, or loses their job, the blame by civil
“rights” leaders goes straight to the whites who are connected to the incident.
Before any investigation takes place, and regardless of anecdotal and even
eye-witness evidence, community based race-baiters and the national “Team
Reverend” starring Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson start pointing the finger at
the “white power” and “racist” bosses. Don’t blind them with the facts. There’s
no money in that. Jackson and Sharpton, and their local counterparts, translate
camera and microphone time to dollar signs.
Let me state before I go another paragraph that ever
since those boyhood days in the turbulent 60s in Tennessee and Georgia, where I
lived, I’ve been around relatives and friends who didn’t see color as a
dividing line for race or society. At the risk of offering up a cliché, some of
my best friends then and now happen to be black. Let me also say the huge
majority of blacks have always been very reasonable and responsible and don’t like
or agree with the jump to judgment any more than the whites around them.
I understand the hurt and anger of the family; even
if the evidence tends to point to the “victim” being wrong. These are their
friends and families. I get it! What I don’t get, and will never get, is how
smashing a store window, stealing a flat screen TV or computer, fleeing only to
come back and loot some more is helping anything. The looting, lining up in the
street and defying police and throwing rocks and bottles at those cops doesn’t
help the investigation which could actually uncover any injustice that may have
occurred. It also creates a terrible image that is projected on TVs around the
globe of the blacks in that community.
If Reverend Sharpton and Reverend Jackson truly want
to do a service for the black community they claim to represent, they would
come into an area like Ferguson and demand that all law-breaking stop
immediately, that parents and citizens in the area, some of whom just stand by
and watch it happen, take back Ferguson. And by take back I mean control the
lawbreakers so a meaningful and fair investigation can take place. If the
violent energy in the streets could be channeled into training in coping
mechanisms within racial mixed communities, this kind of thing could truly be
relegated to the dusty pages of history books. I’d sure love to see that for
the generations that will follow us.
