Topic: Decline of the West
The shameless hypocrisy that characterizes American public life has been well on display recently in and about Ferguson, Missouri.
What does it take for our ruling elites to notice that large numbers of young black men are being gunned down on the streets of our cities? Why, of course, if the shooter happens to be white and better still if he happens to be a white police officer! Then the death of a young black man becomes a heinous crime. But in the much more common circumstance when a young black man is killed by another young black man…move along, folks, nothing to see here…
We’ve been here before, of course. When George Zimmerman shot Treyvon Martin, the media were quick to characterize the former as “white Hispanic,” a hitherto unknown ethnic category. When photos of Zimmerman surfaced, showing that he was unlikely ever to be mistaken for Elizabeth Warren’s brother, the media tied themselves into knots trying to analyze his “complicated” ethnicity. Surely there was some white racism in there someplace!
The shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson is, thankfully from the media’s point of view, a simpler case. The victim was black and the shooter was unambiguously white—a white police officer to boot! With that the civil rights industry—it stopped being a movement decades ago—was off and running. The standard-issue gaggle of horribles, Al Sharpton and Eric Holder leading the charge, rampaged across our TV screens barfing out the usual rhetoric. Another martyr had spilled his blood in the crusade to expose the vile racism of White Amerikka. The possibility that the facts of the case might tell a different story was not merely discounted but furiously denounced as thought crime.
There was, indeed, something phony about it all—all, that is, except the looting and burning of businesses in Ferguson. The desire for free stuff, the thrill of wanton destruction, those were heartfelt emotions. But who could look at the Rev. Sharpton without thinking that he was some kind of malign Muppet, or listen to the blathering of earnest pundits without knowing in advance what they would say? It was all in the script.
Meanwhile in Chicago there have been 1,292 shooting victims in Chicago from 1 January 2014 to date. Here are the details of just one of those shootings: At about 9 pm on 10 August, a 16-year-old boy named Jabari Scurlock was shot and killed in an alley on the 5900 block of South Justine Street on the South Side. He was the only shooting victim who lost his life that weekend in Chicago, though 26 other people were wounded. Need I add that Jabari’s death attracted no attention from Al Sharpton, Eric Holder or the national media?
During Michael Brown’s funeral, which received national news coverage, he was eulogized as a “gentle soul”—though the store clerk that he pushed around shortly before his fatal encounter with Officer Wilson might beg to disagree. His death at the hands of a white cop has made Brown a celebrity. But few people have heard about the death of Jabari Scurlock.
What does that tell you?