Will We Never Learn?

Police have killed 766 Americans this year.*

Two hundred fifty-five of those deaths--almost exactly one-third--have happened since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis.

And now Kenosha. Last Sunday, Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha police force, shot unarmed 29-year-old Jacob Blake seven times in the back.

Seven times. In the back.

Blake is alive for now, paralyzed from the waist down and with severe internal injuries. He was shot as he was attempting to get into his car. Shesky fired at very close range. Putting seven rounds into a suspect you're actually holding by his shirt is beyond excessive. It speaks of intent to kill.

If anyone thought, in this season of plague and politics, that Kenosha would remain quiet after the needless shooting of a Black man at the hands of police officers, they've been living on a different planet.

Violence begets violence. Senseless violence begets anger and more senseless violence. Of course protests were going to happen, and of course they would turn violent. America is angry.

The target of our anger is, oxymoronically, a vacuum: the vacuum of leadership in Washington that should have offered assistance, supported victims and helped to find a peaceful way to resolve the situation. Instead, the fearmongering, hate-spewing, tyrannical Psycho-in-Chief, knowing nothing of leadership or conflict resolution, blames everyone in reach and makes inflammatory threats to send in troops, which heightens the tension, leading to more violence, and on and on . . .

We will fight back.

I happen to believe that the majority of American police forces are staffed by women and men who take seriously the charge "To protect and defend." But the profession also draws rogues who are attracted by the notion of having control over citizens, and sadists like Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd.

One such is 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a police and/or militia wannabe who showed up with some other rifle-toting terrorists on the third night of protests. At some point, possibly because he had fallen and feared attack, he fired randomly into the crowd, killing two people and injuring one. He was arrested and is being held in Antioch, Illinois. He faces first-degree murder charges.

And he is celebrated. Fools-of-a-Kind Aubrey Huff and Tucker Carlson actually praised Rittenhouse, a terrorist whom on-site videos show to be a cold-blooded killer.

Will we never learn?


--- Diogenes, 8/27/2020

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* The Washington Post, "Fatal Force," https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/