Sunday, February 14, 2016

5 Unarmed Black Men Shot Within Days

5 U.S. law enforcement officers shot dead within days - CNN.com:

Suppose that headline might get some attention? It was 5 Law Enforcement Officers ... never mind.

There are about 21M black men in the US, with about half of them (49%) being aged < 34 ... so 10.5 million. If 5 of them had been shot it would be 5 out of 10.5 million.

There are something a bit less then a million police officers ... 900K is a common number. So the 5 officers shot is 5 out of a million (I'm being generous here).  One doesn't have to be much of a statistician to arrive at "10x the problem".

Of course if the young black men were the headline, the outcry would defy imagination.

Yes, the link is from CNN, it **IS** being covered, but looking at both CNN and Fox this AM, it isn't visible on either of their front pages, nor is it available on my supposedly "popularity based" Google News clipping service.

Naturally you don't have to look very long in conservative media to read about it -- this one being about the obvious difference in BO response to Ferguson, Baltimore, etc rather than to police being gunned down.

However, there is another interesting aspect here, as there commonly is in "conservative media". True conservatives are very aware that reality is not ideologically based! There are MANY sides, one of which was covered in a great article over at NRO in 2014 that I happened to recall ..
Imagine if I were to tell you there is a large group of government employees, with generous salaries and ridiculously cushy retirement pensions covered by the taxpayer, who enjoy incredible job security and are rarely held accountable even for activities that would almost certainly earn the rest of us prison time. When there is proven misconduct, these government employees are merely reassigned and are rarely dismissed. The bill for any legal settlements concerning their errors? It, too, is covered by the taxpayers. Their unions are among the strongest in the country.  
No, I’m not talking about public-school teachers. I’m talking about the police.
The article DOES point out the fact that many / most officers are excellent, and why conservatives have a knee jerk response to support them for good reason (order vs chaos), but gives ample food for thought.

The nation was founded by brilliant and COMPLEX men. Men that knew that living, leading and thinking in the real world required assimilation of many views and paradoxes and seeing to apply timeless principles to their ordering while even considering "the human element" ... emotion, intuition and perhaps revelation.

Nothing ... or at best (worst?), very little, is simple. Humility an important place to start. I also often find that an "opposite shift of perspective ... black vs white, democrat vs republican, female vs male, atheist vs christian, christian vs muslim ... can help to clear the fog of bias and ideology.

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