Ferguson, Missouri, is an American nightmare
As one who's old enough to remember the ugly scenes in the American South in the 1960s, I can't help but think of the current situation in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson as some kind of time-warp.
Chez Pazienza's TAKE ON THE MATTER merits your consideration:
<p style="padding-left: 30px">Justice in the shooting of Mike Brown involves two things: knowing what the truth is and reacting fairly and responsibly to that truth. Witnesses say Brown, who was unarmed at the time, was shot down in the middle of the street as he was running away with his hands in the air from an ugly and seemingly unnecessary run-in with a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri last Saturday afternoon…
<p style="padding-left: 30px">[A]bout those cops: it's really almost impossible to be on their side right now in any capacity. In addition to the shooting itself, their reaction and overreaction to some of the protests that have sprung up in the wake of the incident are nothing short of infuriating. Yes, there's been violence, but when you've got heavily-armed SWAT teams with guns trained on a crowd of peaceful protesters, you've lost any semblance of moral authority you're supposed to have and uphold. Add to that the breaking development this evening that some of those SWAT teams rousted a local McDonalds and without provocation arrested two journalists — the Huffington Post's Ryan J. Reilly and the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery — and you've got a police presence in Ferguson that's completely out of control, one that's behaving like an occupying military force rather than a peace-keeping entity…
<p style="padding-left: 30px">In some ways Ferguson, Missouri has become a nightmarish snapshot of America, circa 2014 — with hucksters and hackers and guns, oh my. It's a gruesome social satire that would be funny if the whole thing wasn't so damn tragic, with all of it stemming from a dead black teenager laying in the middle of a street after becoming the latest victim of blue-on-black violence. As it is, what's happening in Ferguson should concern every single American, because if this is us — if this madness is allowed to happen on our soil — our difficulty in getting to the truth of what really happened to Mike Brown, and getting justice for him, is just the beginning of our problems.