Re: [blind-democracy] The President Is Wrong About Dallas, Wrong About Race

This article by William Boardman, is a very thought provoking Opinion Piece.
If anyone has missed reading it, don't pass up the opportunity to
expand your mind.

Carl Jarvis



7/10/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Boardman writes: "In contrast to the political and media world, the Dallas
> marchers represent millions of people whose voices are not heard, have not
> been heard almost forever, but need to be heard and heeded now. The
> President could have chosen that path. Instead he went the well-travelled
> way of ritual division and either/or thinking."
>
> President Obama observes a ceremony to honor NATO soldiers at the NATO
> summit in Warsaw on Friday. (photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
>
>
> The President Is Wrong About Dallas, Wrong About Race
> By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
> 10 July 16
>
> "There is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any
> violence against law enforcement. Anyone involved in the senseless murders
> will be held fully accountable. Justice will be done."
> – President Obama, at the NATO summit in Warsaw, July 8, 2016
> What the President expressed is a conventional wisdom meme, and it is both
> inadequate and false in so many ways, but it reflects the unhealthy
> American
> zeitgeist all too well. Probably this argument will offend some people, but
> its purpose is to get beyond the popular willingness to be offended and get
> to a more considered place of comprehension. But first we have to find our
> way out the mental squirrel cage that keeps our public discourse from
> viewing our country, our world, and even ourselves with any kind of healthy
> sense of wholeness and interconnectedness.
> In contrast to the political and media world, the Dallas marchers represent
> millions of people whose voices are not heard, have not been heard almost
> forever, but need to be heard and heeded now. The President could have
> chosen that path. Instead he went the well-travelled way of ritual division
> and either/or thinking.
> "There is no possible justification" – Nonsense. There are many possible
> justifications. There may be no justification that the President or others
> would accept. But Dylann Roof and his ilk would accept a "race war"
> justification, and that meme is openly floated in right-wing circles as a
> good thing. As far as we know, Micah Johnson made no particular effort to
> justify shooting random Dallas police officers, but he reportedly
> considered
> white people his enemies. That is NOT an irrational perspective for a black
> person in America to have, even though it's also not universally true.
> There
> are millions of white people of good will who are unlikely ever to shoot a
> man with his seatbelt on, reaching for his wallet. And there are millions
> of
> white people who are unlikely ever to protest such an execution-by-cop by
> standing up against the dominant culture (as illustrated in this viral
> video
> with over 9 million views).
> Unacceptable justifications in one context are acceptable in other
> contexts,
> again regardless of their basis in truth. Jihadist terrorism is widely
> accepted on the basis that the West is the enemy of Islam, or that Shia are
> the enemy of Salafism, or that Israel is the enemy of Palestine, and there
> are no doubt other contexts as well where the killing is far less targeted
> than it was in Dallas. And American presidential assassination-by-drone is
> widely accepted on the basis of killing the enemy, even when we don't know
> who we're killing. The President retreats to meaningless cliché with the
> "no
> possible justification" meme, since there are a multitude of justifications
> and the question is what makes them valid or comprehensible.
> "these kinds of attacks" – That's threat inflation, fear-mongering. There
> has been one such attack, only one, and it happened in a city where the
> black police chief has worked hard for years to improve race relations with
> the Dallas police. To speak of "this kind of attack" is to anticipate more,
> almost invite more, when the prospect of more is unknown. What's the best
> thing to say to head off another potential urban sniper, insofar as that's
> possible? Out of hand condemnation is hardly an incentive for anyone to
> have
> second thoughts. Out of hand condemnation from the top of the power
> structure is more likely to harden the notion that the power structure is
> the enemy. There may be no way to head off anyone committed to a sniper
> attack, but surely an acknowledgement that the grievances are real and
> longstanding has a better chance of diffusing such a threat if it's real.
> Ultimately there's nothing that will assure perfect safety anywhere; even
> Norway has had its mass killing. But comparing the American experience to
> Norway's or any other advanced country's has to suggest that others are
> doing a better job of providing fairness and security to their populations
> (although the immigration wild card may change all that).
> "any violence against law enforcement" – This categorical condemnation is
> not only thoughtless, it goes to the heart of the problem of racial
> policing
> in the U.S. The absolute prohibition of "any violence against law
> enforcement" is rooted in a hidden assumption: that law enforcement is
> always fair, measured, just. This assumption is as false as an assumption
> that all white people or all Muslims are "the enemy." Law enforcement does
> not inherently deserve an assumption of probity. Law officers need to earn
> trust on a daily basis, just like anyone else. If Alton Sterling or
> Philando
> Castile had used violence against law enforcement in their particular
> circumstances, they would have had a credible defense of self-defense
> instead of being dead for no coherent reason. Is there a "possible
> justification" for those police executions? No doubt there are, and no
> doubt
> they've been deployed, and no doubt some will find them credible, and that
> nexus is also part of the problem. A culture in which resort to deadly
> force
> is an early option, not a last option, is a culture that is inherently
> unstable and unsafe.
> "Anyone involved" – Demagogic rhetoric, this feeds conspiracy speculation.
> This is irresponsible when facts are unknown. "Anyone" is too vague,
> "involved" is too broad, the chest thumping is too loud. Of course we want
> whoever did this to be caught and held accountable. Early Dallas police
> reports said there were probably several shooters. There turned out to be
> one. He told police he acted alone and was not affiliated with any group,
> which police have not disputed. Why did the President, thousands of miles
> away, choose to cast a wider net?
> "in the senseless murders" – Not only a very tired cliché, this is false
> and
> feeds denial. These were murders, as were the deaths of Sterling and
> Castile, but none of them were "senseless." These were not random acts of
> chance, they were acts with a history – however tortured and irrational, a
> history all the same. Getting at that history is hard, perhaps impossible
> in
> some cases (Micah Johnson will never explain what brought him to a
> homicidal
> end in downtown Dallas), but that history is worth searching for and
> understanding. To call the murders "senseless" is to dismiss their history,
> to deny its worth, to leave a black hole where there could be knowledge.
> For
> America's "first black President" to perpetuate America's denial or its
> racist past, present, and future is beyond ironic.
> "will be held fully accountable" – Appropriate enough, but a routine
> promise, often empty. Here, the words were hardly out of the President's
> mouth (or maybe it was before), that Micah Johnson was dead, killed by a
> police robot with a bomb. There seems little reason, if any, to regret this
> result beyond the loss of any life and the possibility of understanding.
> There's no apparent injustice in the end of Johnson's life after he has
> executed five police officers for no other apparent reason than that they
> were police officers. There is no reason to believe any of them had done
> anything wrong, much less wronged Johnson. They were in the wrong place at
> the wrong time in a random universe, like any other victim of most
> shootings
> and bombings.
> What is striking is the difference between the President's tone here –
> "full" accountability for the perpetrator(s) – and his tone just the day
> before when reacting to the cop-executions of Sterling and Castile:
> All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton
> Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights,
> Minnesota. We've seen such tragedies far too many times, and our hearts go
> out to the families and communities who've suffered such a painful loss.
> The President did not say there was "no possible justification" for
> shooting
> a man lying flat on his back or a man strapped in the passenger seat of a
> car. Yes, there are always "possible justifications," no matter how
> far-fetched, and we'll be hearing them soon enough, as we've heard them so
> many times in the past. But these are not "tragedies." It is not a tragedy
> when a cop chokes a man to death or shoots a man in a dark stairway or
> blows
> away a twelve-year old with a toy gun. These are innocent, unarmed people
> killed in cold blood. These are not tragedies, they are something more like
> negligent homicide, or murder.
> "Justice will be done." – That's what they all say, but justice must also
> be
> seen to be done, and that's less common by far. In Dallas, whatever justice
> there is for Micah Johnson has been done. It's over. For the five dead
> Dallas police officers, there will never be any justice. Their deaths and
> the rings of hurt rippling through their families, friends, fellow officers
> are there forever. What bitterness that will breed is immeasurable, but
> will
> almost certainly make it harder for Dallas police to continue their
> progressive efforts at building any sense of racial community.
> The President spoke to this issue before the Dallas shootings, in the
> context of Sterling and Castile: "… what's clear is that these fatal
> shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader
> challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that
> appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust
> that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they
> serve. To admit we've got a serious problem in no way contradicts our
> respect and appreciation for the vast majority of police officers who put
> their lives on the line to protect us every single day. It is to say that,
> as a nation, we can and must do better to institute the best practices that
> reduce the appearance or reality of racial bias in law enforcement."
> This is certainly the beginning of an explanation, if not a "possible
> justification," of attacks against law enforcement, uncommon as they are.
> This is a description of the reality that Dallas police chief David Brown,
> who is intimately familiar with these issues and has led Dallas to become,
> in Mayor Mike Rawlings' words, "one of the premier community policing
> cities
> in the country," a method designed to develop interaction and trust between
> police and residents. It is not a new method, but police departments
> nationwide have resisted or rejected it (sometimes in favor of the more
> polarizing "stop and frisk" approach). Implementing a more communal
> policing
> policy in Dallas was sometimes resisted by the local police union, but the
> police department continued to improve by most metrics, including
> decreasing
> crime, fewer arrests, and fewer complaints of excessive force by police.
> The
> last time a Dallas police officer was killed was 2009. A lone sniper
> killing
> five officers this week now threatens to de-stabilize one of the best
> police
> departments in the country when it comes to healing race relations. No
> small
> irony for a black veteran to do the work of white supremacists.
> Also contributing to the tolerance of white supremacist sentiments is the
> national Fraternal Order of Police (known among other things for its years
> of personal jihad against Mumia Abu Jamal). The 330,000 member Fraternal
> Order of Police, like police unions all over the country, keeps its wagons
> circled tightly around cops, good or bad, in the same way the NRA defends
> gun owners at almost all costs. The day after the shootings, FOP executive
> director Jim Pasco called for the Department of Justice to investigate the
> Dallas shootings as a hate crime, posthumously, and criticized President
> Obama for his handling of the week's events:
> We'd like to see the president make one speech that speaks to everybody
> instead of one speech that speaks to black people as they grieve and one
> speech that speaks to police officers as they grieve. We don't need two
> presidents, we only need one. We need one who works to unify the United
> States.
> One of the best ways to unify the United States would be for police
> organizations to restore trust by purging the racist thugs in their ranks
> and make cops as accountable for their actions as anyone else. The Blue
> Wall
> of Silence prevents that from happening and reinforces the spiraling fear
> and anger at police by protecting the minority of thug cops at the expense
> of the safety and wellbeing of the majority who do their job honorably. How
> mad is that?
> If its madness we're after, consider the global context of this week's
> events, when the President was in Warsaw for a meeting of NATO members
> apparently determined to continue the two decades of NATO provocation of
> Russia, regardless of the consequences. If the U.S. can't stop playing
> Russian roulette with nuclear war, sooner or later American race relations
> will be immaterial.
> At home or abroad, it's really not helpful for the bully pulpit to be on
> the
> side of the bullies.
>
> ________________________________________
> William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
> print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
> judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
> Corporation
> for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
> nomination
> from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
> Permission
> to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
> Supported News.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> President Obama observes a ceremony to honor NATO soldiers at the NATO
> summit in Warsaw on Friday. (photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
> http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
> The President Is Wrong About Dallas, Wrong About Race
> By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
> 10 July 16
> "There is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any
> violence against law enforcement. Anyone involved in the senseless murders
> will be held fully accountable. Justice will be done."
>
> – President Obama, at the NATO summit in Warsaw, July 8, 2016
> hat the President expressed is a conventional wisdom meme, and it is both
> inadequate and false in so many ways, but it reflects the unhealthy
> American
> zeitgeist all too well. Probably this argument will offend some people, but
> its purpose is to get beyond the popular willingness to be offended and get
> to a more considered place of comprehension. But first we have to find our
> way out the mental squirrel cage that keeps our public discourse from
> viewing our country, our world, and even ourselves with any kind of healthy
> sense of wholeness and interconnectedness.
> In contrast to the political and media world, the Dallas marchers represent
> millions of people whose voices are not heard, have not been heard almost
> forever, but need to be heard and heeded now. The President could have
> chosen that path. Instead he went the well-travelled way of ritual division
> and either/or thinking.
> "There is no possible justification" – Nonsense. There are many possible
> justifications. There may be no justification that the President or others
> would accept. But Dylann Roof and his ilk would accept a "race war"
> justification, and that meme is openly floated in right-wing circles as a
> good thing. As far as we know, Micah Johnson made no particular effort to
> justify shooting random Dallas police officers, but he reportedly
> considered
> white people his enemies. That is NOT an irrational perspective for a black
> person in America to have, even though it's also not universally true.
> There
> are millions of white people of good will who are unlikely ever to shoot a
> man with his seatbelt on, reaching for his wallet. And there are millions
> of
> white people who are unlikely ever to protest such an execution-by-cop by
> standing up against the dominant culture (as illustrated in this viral
> video
> with over 9 million views).
> Unacceptable justifications in one context are acceptable in other
> contexts,
> again regardless of their basis in truth. Jihadist terrorism is widely
> accepted on the basis that the West is the enemy of Islam, or that Shia are
> the enemy of Salafism, or that Israel is the enemy of Palestine, and there
> are no doubt other contexts as well where the killing is far less targeted
> than it was in Dallas. And American presidential assassination-by-drone is
> widely accepted on the basis of killing the enemy, even when we don't know
> who we're killing. The President retreats to meaningless cliché with the
> "no
> possible justification" meme, since there are a multitude of justifications
> and the question is what makes them valid or comprehensible.
> "these kinds of attacks" – That's threat inflation, fear-mongering. There
> has been one such attack, only one, and it happened in a city where the
> black police chief has worked hard for years to improve race relations with
> the Dallas police. To speak of "this kind of attack" is to anticipate more,
> almost invite more, when the prospect of more is unknown. What's the best
> thing to say to head off another potential urban sniper, insofar as that's
> possible? Out of hand condemnation is hardly an incentive for anyone to
> have
> second thoughts. Out of hand condemnation from the top of the power
> structure is more likely to harden the notion that the power structure is
> the enemy. There may be no way to head off anyone committed to a sniper
> attack, but surely an acknowledgement that the grievances are real and
> longstanding has a better chance of diffusing such a threat if it's real.
> Ultimately there's nothing that will assure perfect safety anywhere; even
> Norway has had its mass killing. But comparing the American experience to
> Norway's or any other advanced country's has to suggest that others are
> doing a better job of providing fairness and security to their populations
> (although the immigration wild card may change all that).
> "any violence against law enforcement" – This categorical condemnation is
> not only thoughtless, it goes to the heart of the problem of racial
> policing
> in the U.S. The absolute prohibition of "any violence against law
> enforcement" is rooted in a hidden assumption: that law enforcement is
> always fair, measured, just. This assumption is as false as an assumption
> that all white people or all Muslims are "the enemy." Law enforcement does
> not inherently deserve an assumption of probity. Law officers need to earn
> trust on a daily basis, just like anyone else. If Alton Sterling or
> Philando
> Castile had used violence against law enforcement in their particular
> circumstances, they would have had a credible defense of self-defense
> instead of being dead for no coherent reason. Is there a "possible
> justification" for those police executions? No doubt there are, and no
> doubt
> they've been deployed, and no doubt some will find them credible, and that
> nexus is also part of the problem. A culture in which resort to deadly
> force
> is an early option, not a last option, is a culture that is inherently
> unstable and unsafe.
> "Anyone involved" – Demagogic rhetoric, this feeds conspiracy speculation.
> This is irresponsible when facts are unknown. "Anyone" is too vague,
> "involved" is too broad, the chest thumping is too loud. Of course we want
> whoever did this to be caught and held accountable. Early Dallas police
> reports said there were probably several shooters. There turned out to be
> one. He told police he acted alone and was not affiliated with any group,
> which police have not disputed. Why did the President, thousands of miles
> away, choose to cast a wider net?
> "in the senseless murders" – Not only a very tired cliché, this is false
> and
> feeds denial. These were murders, as were the deaths of Sterling and
> Castile, but none of them were "senseless." These were not random acts of
> chance, they were acts with a history – however tortured and irrational, a
> history all the same. Getting at that history is hard, perhaps impossible
> in
> some cases (Micah Johnson will never explain what brought him to a
> homicidal
> end in downtown Dallas), but that history is worth searching for and
> understanding. To call the murders "senseless" is to dismiss their history,
> to deny its worth, to leave a black hole where there could be knowledge.
> For
> America's "first black President" to perpetuate America's denial or its
> racist past, present, and future is beyond ironic.
> "will be held fully accountable" – Appropriate enough, but a routine
> promise, often empty. Here, the words were hardly out of the President's
> mouth (or maybe it was before), that Micah Johnson was dead, killed by a
> police robot with a bomb. There seems little reason, if any, to regret this
> result beyond the loss of any life and the possibility of understanding.
> There's no apparent injustice in the end of Johnson's life after he has
> executed five police officers for no other apparent reason than that they
> were police officers. There is no reason to believe any of them had done
> anything wrong, much less wronged Johnson. They were in the wrong place at
> the wrong time in a random universe, like any other victim of most
> shootings
> and bombings.
> What is striking is the difference between the President's tone here –
> "full" accountability for the perpetrator(s) – and his tone just the day
> before when reacting to the cop-executions of Sterling and Castile:
> All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton
> Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights,
> Minnesota. We've seen such tragedies far too many times, and our hearts go
> out to the families and communities who've suffered such a painful loss.
> The President did not say there was "no possible justification" for
> shooting
> a man lying flat on his back or a man strapped in the passenger seat of a
> car. Yes, there are always "possible justifications," no matter how
> far-fetched, and we'll be hearing them soon enough, as we've heard them so
> many times in the past. But these are not "tragedies." It is not a tragedy
> when a cop chokes a man to death or shoots a man in a dark stairway or
> blows
> away a twelve-year old with a toy gun. These are innocent, unarmed people
> killed in cold blood. These are not tragedies, they are something more like
> negligent homicide, or murder.
> "Justice will be done." – That's what they all say, but justice must also
> be
> seen to be done, and that's less common by far. In Dallas, whatever justice
> there is for Micah Johnson has been done. It's over. For the five dead
> Dallas police officers, there will never be any justice. Their deaths and
> the rings of hurt rippling through their families, friends, fellow officers
> are there forever. What bitterness that will breed is immeasurable, but
> will
> almost certainly make it harder for Dallas police to continue their
> progressive efforts at building any sense of racial community.
> The President spoke to this issue before the Dallas shootings, in the
> context of Sterling and Castile: "… what's clear is that these fatal
> shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader
> challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that
> appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust
> that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they
> serve. To admit we've got a serious problem in no way contradicts our
> respect and appreciation for the vast majority of police officers who put
> their lives on the line to protect us every single day. It is to say that,
> as a nation, we can and must do better to institute the best practices that
> reduce the appearance or reality of racial bias in law enforcement."
> This is certainly the beginning of an explanation, if not a "possible
> justification," of attacks against law enforcement, uncommon as they are.
> This is a description of the reality that Dallas police chief David Brown,
> who is intimately familiar with these issues and has led Dallas to become,
> in Mayor Mike Rawlings' words, "one of the premier community policing
> cities
> in the country," a method designed to develop interaction and trust between
> police and residents. It is not a new method, but police departments
> nationwide have resisted or rejected it (sometimes in favor of the more
> polarizing "stop and frisk" approach). Implementing a more communal
> policing
> policy in Dallas was sometimes resisted by the local police union, but the
> police department continued to improve by most metrics, including
> decreasing
> crime, fewer arrests, and fewer complaints of excessive force by police.
> The
> last time a Dallas police officer was killed was 2009. A lone sniper
> killing
> five officers this week now threatens to de-stabilize one of the best
> police
> departments in the country when it comes to healing race relations. No
> small
> irony for a black veteran to do the work of white supremacists.
> Also contributing to the tolerance of white supremacist sentiments is the
> national Fraternal Order of Police (known among other things for its years
> of personal jihad against Mumia Abu Jamal). The 330,000 member Fraternal
> Order of Police, like police unions all over the country, keeps its wagons
> circled tightly around cops, good or bad, in the same way the NRA defends
> gun owners at almost all costs. The day after the shootings, FOP executive
> director Jim Pasco called for the Department of Justice to investigate the
> Dallas shootings as a hate crime, posthumously, and criticized President
> Obama for his handling of the week's events:
> We'd like to see the president make one speech that speaks to everybody
> instead of one speech that speaks to black people as they grieve and one
> speech that speaks to police officers as they grieve. We don't need two
> presidents, we only need one. We need one who works to unify the United
> States.
> One of the best ways to unify the United States would be for police
> organizations to restore trust by purging the racist thugs in their ranks
> and make cops as accountable for their actions as anyone else. The Blue
> Wall
> of Silence prevents that from happening and reinforces the spiraling fear
> and anger at police by protecting the minority of thug cops at the expense
> of the safety and wellbeing of the majority who do their job honorably. How
> mad is that?
> If its madness we're after, consider the global context of this week's
> events, when the President was in Warsaw for a meeting of NATO members
> apparently determined to continue the two decades of NATO provocation of
> Russia, regardless of the consequences. If the U.S. can't stop playing
> Russian roulette with nuclear war, sooner or later American race relations
> will be immaterial.
> At home or abroad, it's really not helpful for the bully pulpit to be on
> the
> side of the bullies.
>
> William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
> print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
> judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
> Corporation
> for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
> nomination
> from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
> Permission
> to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
> Supported News.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>