no hashtags here

i debated even touching on this topic…

…’cause it’s been done a LOT lately.

i haven’t been to minnesota since i was a kid. i haven’t been to louisiana since last november. so i don’t know exactly what happened in the two recent incidents…and if you weren’t there, neither do you. sure, you’ve seen the cell phone videos, and you’ve seen the testimony by so-called experts on cnn and fox news and all the others, but we don’t KNOW what happened. we weren’t there. from where i sit, neither shooting looks justified, but that’s my OPINION and by no means a fact. here’s what can’t be debated:

1. two men are dead
2. people are upset
3. two men who should be husbands and fathers are now social media’s hashtags of the week

and that’s fucked up.

and then dallas happened. five cops dead, several more injured, mainly from sniper fire from an elevated position over an otherwise peaceful protest in the wake of the weeks violence. this won’t make things better. to paraphrase zeus from die hard with a vengance, “one white cop gets killed and tomorrow [in our neighborhood] there’s a hundred white cops – all with itchy trigger fingers”. hopefully not…but probably so.

and so it begins. or ends, depending on how you look at it.

this country has weathered these kind of issues before, but never with social media and instant coverage like we have now. shit, the girlfriend of the guy shot in minnesota broadcast it live to her facebook feed so the world could see what happened…AFTER he was shot. the events leading up to the shooting? nobody really knows if they weren’t there. but it doesn’t look good for the officer in question.

then there’s the louisiana thing – did he have a gun, did he not? if you weren’t there, you don’t know. and even if he did, was it a justified shoot? again, if you weren’t there, you don’t know. i read on social media that the girlfriend of the victim has now raised $35,000 to send his kids to college. will she blow it in the interim? will the cops let the kids live that long? i guess time will tell.

but none of this justifies dallas. be mad. be upset. let your voice be heard – but don’t start a revolution over it…that’s simply not worth it. don’t get me wrong, i abhor people in authority that abuse there power, and i think we should all be held to the same standards and laws AND punishments as one another whether we carry a badge or a backpack. but deciding to shoot cops because cops in other states or even other precincts did wrong is even MORE wrong. at the end of the day:

most cops aren’t bad or racist
most black people aren’t criminals

and for that matter…

most latin americans aren’t criminals AND are here legally
most asian people can pronounce the letter “L”

sorry, i wanted to throw in at least one funny one – we’ve been almost too serious here.

but we have to put this all on the table. we have to have the discussions. i debated doing this post at all, or simulcasting it to my social media accounts. but it’s too long to be a tweet, too non-visual for instagram, and i’m over thirty so while i HAVE a snapchat i don’t really know how to use it or care. and then there’s facebook – but i don’t need to get likes or “reactions” to what i said above, i just needed to vent. so now it’s out of my system, and those who know me know where to find it.

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