Ferguson: Americans' winter of discontent
It is winter in America, but the people are raging in fire of anger and discontent. The freedom-loving people of the USA, whose constitution is largely based on the prime principle of equal justice for all, are denouncing the seeming total lack of rhyme and reason on the part of the St Louis grand jury, for refusing to charge or indict a white police officer who shot and killed, with no less than twelve bullets, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson City, St Louis County, in the State of Missouri. Today, there are a lot of fires in the streets of Missouri and people are seething in rage and anger. It is a winter of discontent.
President Barrack Obama himself is black, but he seems to be an outsider, in a government largely dominated by whites. Some political analyst now starts to claim that he was just elected because he did not have a very strong opponent. Today, even many blacks are discontented with his administration. His party, the Democratic Party was badly beaten in the just concluded mid-term elections. Obama is now referred to as a lame-duck president. He will even have more difficulties in pushing for his advocacies because Congress is in the hands of the Republicans. Despite all his good intentions, the whites do not seem to give him enough support to succeed.
The handling - or mishandling - of the Ferguson affair is very Republican in style. It smacks of the overwhelming and primordial powers of government and the need for people to sacrifice and even to be sacrificed, in the name of peace, order, and national security, in the interest of upholding the law. The refusal of the grand jury to indict is also Republican in slant because the government would not allow its police officers to fear prosecution for protecting business against thefts, and lawless elements. Michael Brown was suspected of stealing food items from a convenience store.
Assuming indeed that Brown stole from the store, was it legally right for a policeman to summarily execute an unarmed young boy? If the suspected thief were a Caucasian, would a white policeman similarly pepper twelve bullets into his unprotected body? And if the victim was also a Caucasian, would the grand jury still refuse to indict the killer? This is really the bone of contention. It is not just because there was a killing. It was not just because of police brutality. It is about how the whites still treat the blacks many years after the abolition of slavery and segregation. It is apartheid once more. They need Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. again.
In the face of all the chaos, the violence and vandalism, in protest against the Ferguson affair, Obama said: "We have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past decades. But what is also true is that there are still problems, and communities of color aren't just making these problems up."
The President, as we know him, must also be seething in anger. He knows how it is to be a victim of racial prejudice. But he is the President of all Americans, both blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians. He must face his own winter of discontent with stately calmness and presidential equanimity.
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