The Ferguson outrage: A time not to kill
It is snowing a lot nowadays in the US, but the nationwide outrage among blacks, and crowds of Caucasians, Latinos, Asians, and even Europeans and South Americans, is heating up like crazy. The people are rising in violence, vandalism and seditious expressions of anger and rage, against the government's apparently racist mishandling of the Ferguson affair. The people were denouncing the killing by a white police officer, Darren Wilson of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, who was merely suspected of stealing foodstuff from a neighborhood convenience store.
It was very bad enough for a policeman to summarily execute an unarmed civilian. What exacerbates the problem was that the killer happened to be white and the victim was a black. It was bad enough that the victim was unarmed but what aggravated the blatant attack was that the policeman fired no less than twelve bullets at the hapless young man, six of them hitting the victim and causing his instantaneous death. But the last straw that broke the camel's back, so to say, was the refusal of the grand jury (composed of nine whites and three blacks ) to indict Wilson. It was the unkindest cut of all, to quote Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
And so, all hell broke loose in Ferguson, a city of ten acres and some 27,000 people, in the St. Louis County, Missouri. The chaos spread all over the USA, demonstrations and rallies in LA, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, and in many other cities and towns from San Francisco to Connecticut, from Texas to New York, from Florida to Oregon. In Ferguson and all over Missouri, bottles and rocks were thrown at white police officers, windows of stores, shops and restaurants and other establishments were smashed. Police cars were burned. The streets are on fire. If this situation is not addressed with some measure of decisiveness, the whole USA may be under grave and imminent danger.
There is chaos, lawlessness, violence, and cries of A TIME TO KILL reverberate in what used to be very peaceful and sleepy neighborhoods. Well, that is the title of John Grisham's very first legal suspense thriller that sold millions of copies in more than thirty languages all over the world. It was a story of a 10-year-old black girl, Tanya Hailey, who was mercilessly raped by two racist whites and left almost dead . Tanya's father lost no time in murdering the two rapists because he did not trust the white-controlled criminal justice system could simply administer justice to black victims.
It is ironical that the US President is black and today, many decades after the struggles of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks, black Americans are still subjected to racial discriminations and violence. A sarcastic slap on the face of the racist is the mature and level-headed statement made by the victims' parents, "We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child won't face the consequences of his action. While we understand that many others share our pains, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make positive changes. We need to work together fix the system that allowed this travesty to happen.
- Latest
