Where once truths were self-evident and identifiable we have found now, in these unsettled times, that people have closely held versions of the truth – the truth as they see it and, apparently, are prepared to defend to the death.
It may be the American DNA, the way we’re wired, ready to clamber aboard the merchant ships at a moment’s notice, heave the tea chests overboard and hang the consequences. Those quaint old days when logic and reason prevailed appear to have been replaced with applause for those who declare they’re standing their ground – no matter how ridiculous the position – and slam others for not listening to them until like-minded people applaud them.
Where once someone engaging you in a public or private debate could be expected to hear you out, perhaps even utter an “I take your point” from time to time, we now hear the rising, mindless clatter of applause for those who choose to look you in the eye, smile with a certain, scary certainty, and say: “And nothing you say will ever change my mind.”
Check. We weren’t around then but we heard from people who were that even as bad as things were in the Depression a certain open-mindedness prevailed in most local high schools and at the college level. Much of the more broad-minded discussion was spearheaded – and encouraged – by faith-based clubs or groups which encouraged serious study and invited fellow students from any denomination to join – even atheists or other non-believers – provided they were willing to take the goals of the society seriously. We’re told there were weekly meetings for discussion and debate and an annual conference was held for a week off campus where academics, lecturers and business owners made speeches, instilling a life-long love of words and logic and effective use of both by practitioners.
Many of the best public speakers we’ve ever heard told us they were educated in this environment. We could pick it out of their speech patterns even when they were relaxed and speaking colloquially, and we always tended to listen more closely when they were speaking.
During these Strange Days of ours, however, we’ve been struck by the manner in which people are struggling to be heard. Some have proven themselves to be effective communicators during this time of upheaval, others not so much.
Compelling arguments have been made by women in BLM t-shirts outside burned and looted businesses; in the shadow of monuments to men whose actions are being reexamined in a new light; and by others calling for change. Some have been made by police officers standing amid the rubble of their towns or cities.
Unfortunately, it took the old adage “Someone always has to die before anything changes” to be proven true yet again before sweeping overhaul of our law enforcement community; political inclinations and overall social awareness could be examined and implemented.
In the “deaf ears” department we would list New York Police Benevolent Association (PBA) President Mike O’Meara, who chose to rail against legislators and the press for “vilifying” law enforcement in an impassioned speech he made to any and all who would listen.
“Stop treating us like animals, and thugs, and start treating us with some respect. That’s what we’re here today to say,” he said, pacing back and forth behind his microphone. “We’ve been left out of the conversation, we’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting…”
All we can say to that, Mike, with all due respect to your profession, is that you were left out of the conversation by your own choosing, finding it easier to claim you’d been victimized by uncaring politicians and a vengeful media than to actually engage them in honest discussion. For years.
So, sorry, but not sorry, Mike. Man up. And join the discussion in a meaningful manner and get your point across or you’ll find yourself where you find yourself today. Your version of the truth, no matter how disgusting you may find it, isn’t made stronger by repetition and faux outrage. It’s just not the way it works.
My dad was like that. He used to break out his latin whenever he wanted to really let us kids know we were on his bad side! But unfortunately the horse is out of the barn because we have been shown an uneducated fool can rise to the highest office in the land and people will still clap for him no matter what he does. It drives me crazy but there it is.
Humm. Said “uneducated fool”:
– produced a record-low 3.5% unemployment rate.
– record low Black, Hispanic, Asian, and female unemployment rates.
– confronted China (they consider him our smartest and toughest President since Eisenhower).
– brought back 600,000 manufacturing jobs.
– pushed & signed Prison Reform.
– permanently funded Historically Black Colleges & Universities.
– has secured the release of over two dozen Americans held captive with NO ransom payments.
– signed a new USMCA trade deal in record time.
The Outsider is doing great. Bush Jr & Obama failed at many of the above items.
And he totally DOMINATED covid-19.
Made orange fashionable again.
Made clear that violence at his rallies or in the paddy wagon is A-OK. Don’t be gentle with ’em.
The list goes on.
Undercover tapes from Project Veritas actually show a Mr. Kramer, a husband to a Democrat politician, boasting about coordinating violence at Trump rallies w Hillary Clinton.
Kramer was also a frequent guest to the White House & Barack Obama.
I’m speechless.
David, sorry, I spelled his name wrong. Bob Creamer is the founder of Democracy Partners. He is the husband of Jan Shakowsky, a Democratic Congresswoman from Chicago, and he visited Barack Obama’s White House over 350 times (visitor logs). Ted Cruz further stated he had 45 meetings with President Obama.
In 2005, he pled guilty to tax violations and bank fraud and served five months in prison. Creamer is a Saul Alinsky disciple. Scott Foval, who worked with Creamer, said they sent in anarchists to Trump rallies to create physical conflict. I believe he also boasted about voter fraud.
No, I didn’t literally mean that I am speechless. I didn’t mean that I don’t understand. It’s a rhetorical device. A figurative jaw-drop. If I elaborated, I don’t think my post would pass the censors. Your views are without basis in fact. People who hold your phantasmagoric views are scary, but your numbers are dwindling every day. I am encouraged at last.
So Creamer & Foval lied when secretly taped? Since the taping was secret, how did they coordinate their lies?
FYI, they were both fired 3 days after these undercover tapes dropped.
Unfortunately, the MSM doesn’t want to even give us baseline facts. Because there are baseline facts. Who, what, when, where, why & how.
New York City had 2300-2400 murders a year in the 1980s. Hence, the Guardian Angels were born. The Broken Window policing theory was put into action, more officers, and the yearly murder rate plummeted to 300 per year!
Chicago had a different approach, I believe led by the ACLU. A soft on crime approach followed. Murders jumped from 400 to 700 per year, a massive increase in a much smaller city.
Many MSM types don’t like such facts. The death of Mr. Floyd was a tragedy. But I believe most would agree being convicted of crimes 9 different times isn’t a good strategy.
The New York Times won’t print such facts. Or Governor Cuomo sending released, infected seniors back into nursing homes! No, leave that to the New York Post.
And I’m not blind. The Nuevo nightclub Chauvin & Floyd worked at appears shady, very shady. Tied to a three letter federal agency? A coincidence Floyd had counterfeit money? A coincidence that one of the first buildings to be burned in Minneapolis – and a sound heard “like a bomb went off” – was this same nightclub.
Speechless as well.
I certainly believe in everyone’s right to their own beliefs and opinions, BUT I am very tired of misleading statements of facts that is happening with increased frequency.
#1
“Crime was starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken windows policing,” says Harcourt, the Columbia law professor. “And of course what we witnessed from that period, basically from about 1991, was that the crime in the country starts going down, and it’s a remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now, what’s so remarkable about it is how widespread it was.”
Harcourt points out that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where police departments were mired in corruption scandals and largely viewed as dysfunctional, such as Los Angeles.
A graph in Kelling’s 2001 paper is revealing. It shows the crime rate falling dramatically in the early 1990s. But this small view gives us a selective picture. Right before this decline came a spike in crime. And if you go further back, you see a series of spikes and declines. And each time, the bigger a spike, the bigger the decline that follows, as crime reverts to the mean.
Kelling acknowledges that broken windows may not have had a dramatic effect on crime.
#2
Citing a study by University of Utah researchers, Sessions claimed that a legal settlement over police conduct between the ACLU and the city “resulted in approximately 236 additional victims killed and over 1,100 additional shootings in 2016 alone.”
Sessions misstated the ACLU’s involvement with the Chicago police department — there was no lawsuit. He did, however, correctly recite conclusions of the study.
The overriding question, then, is whether the study reaches sound conclusions. On that, there is considerable disagreement. Chicago police stops did indeed dramatically plunge in the wake of a city agreement with the ACLU to overhaul its stop-and-frisk policy. A big jump in the city’s murder rate also coincided with the end of policy’s end. Even so, New York and other big cities did not experience hikes in violence and murders after curtailing stop-and-frisk.
Other academics express serious reservations about the research methods used by the Utah study. The skeptics also point to an array of factors that may also have contributed to the murder and violence spike — not the least of which was the wrenching impact of the Laquan McDonald shooting video.
There is considerable debate about that.
There is some element of truth in the statement made by Sessions, but it also ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.
#3
The question of past arrests often surfaces among people who want to rationalize police officers’ actions when Black men are killed in custody
According to court records in Harris County, which encompasses Floyd’s hometown of Houston, authorities arrested him on nine separate occasions between 1997 and 2007, mostly on drug and theft charges that resulted in months-long jail sentences.
#4
No evidence supporting your last paragraph re, The Nuevo Rodeo nightclub
Debating crime statistics can get into the weeds. So Chicago went from approx 950 murders per year to 400, great. Then change. “In Chicago, for example, the murder rate nearly doubled between 2014 and 2016. Milwaukee and Louisville, Kentucky, saw comparable spikes.”
Today Chicago back up to 653 murders per year (9.4 murders per 100,000 people), while New York sits at 292 murders at a 2.9 rate. Chicago has a murder rate 300% of NYs.
I am open to plausible, well thought analysis. I read a compelling, in-depth analysis years ago pinpointing a drop in cri.e to a reduction in lead paint. Really.
Our potential home-grown criminals are aging (aging society), Bill Clinton added lots of police, and our nation cracked down on crack. Lots of reasons.
Not excusing police behavior, talking reality. I’ll ocassionally have an electrical short on an old car (light). I’m polite to every officer who pulls me over. Guess what. Two might give me a warning, one a fix-it ticket, and two write me a maximum ticket.
I was very impressed by the presidents birthday flotilla. Now along with other very fine people he’s got the military, the police, the bikers AND the boaters ready to go to fight for him.
I have to say it’s good to see some discussion coming out of this now that the initial pain and wrath has subsided somewhat. There’s some dialogue going on and thats a good thing and I hope it continues. The police have things they need to address and fix its true — so do a whole lot of others in this country. It would be nice to think we could fix some things together again.
Amen.