Props

Thank you, Dan Bernstein, for having the stones to speak an ugly truth out loud on the radio. You had the temerity to say “We want this. We vote for this.”

I have never, ever heard those words spoken out loud.

As you said, a vote for a Republican is a vote for dead kids. Republicans are complicit. And indefensible. In light of all the complexities that surround gun violence, it is remarkable we can draw a line back to a single political party and its unswerving, unwavering support of all things gun.

It also happens to be the same political party given to anointing itself as the 'defenders of the sanctity of life' via their plans to revoke Roe v. Wade--even as they enable previously-unseen numbers of guns to find a home here.

This is on you, Republicans. First, last and always. May it not be long before you and your loved ones know the terror of those children in Uvalde, Texas.

God damn you all.

Adulting

How do you wrap your brain around parents who are alleged to have not only gifted their emotionally-troubled son with an early Christmas present of a handgun, but gave him full and unrestricted access even after he showed signs of intending to do harm with it?

I mean...how? What the fuck?

Your kid's teacher finds him shopping for ammo on his phone and they're the bad guy? Another teacher finds a disturbing note—accompanied by an equally-disturbing drawing—and they're what? Radicalized socialists intruding on your son's privacy? Second Amendment rights? First Amendment rights? All of the above?

Given your uninvolvement, I'm shocked you visited the school when summoned. In the most towering example of not-my-kid we have ever been unfortunate-enough to witness, you refused to intervene and schedule counseling, much less take a peek at his backpack. What right would that have violated, Mr. and Mrs. Crumbley?

You even resisted the request to remove your child from school. I'm thinking that as taxpayers, you were determined that your son receive every cent of every tax dollar you paid to support his public school.

Wondering: do you seek life advice from Alex Jones? Do you remain perturbed that last year's attempt to assassinate Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer failed? And finally, Trump didn't really lose, did he?

Can I get your thoughts on COVID vaccines?

That's right. I'm accusing you of being Trumpers. Because the stupidity you repeatedly showed in this tiny week-long window is staggering. And frankly, only a Trumper is capable of it.

Word is that you left Oxford “for your own safety.” It's a shame your son's victims didn't have that option, isn't it? If it isn't bad enough we have the NRA writing our nation's gun policy—such as it is—we have “parents” like you doing everything but engraving invitations to their kids to slaughter their classmates.

It's not easy being green—or Trump—is it?

I can't wait to hear your justification. Ditto that of your son. In a world that truly valued life (nope—overturning Roe v. Wade doesn't count), the three of you would rot in prison.

Here's hoping.

 

Holy Toledo?

Perhaps the best and worst feature of photography is its ability to suspend time. To forever freeze a moment. A personal favorite is the exuberant sailor who spontaneously grabbed a nurse in Manhattan on V-J Day and kissed her deeply.

The unbridled joy of war ending never had a better expression.

Not so joyous is the image of a young man, caught in the glare of police lights and suddenly appearing as a vulnerable child just moments before he was shot to death.

In the face of a hysterically over-reactive population, this tiny moment, just milliseconds long, will act as permanent condemnation of the Chicago Police Department and the officer who shot him.

Some background: Chicago police, reacting to gunfire in the city's Little Village neighborhood, came upon Adam Toledo and twenty-one year-old Ruben Roman, fresh from firing their gun at cars.

As gang-bangers are wont to do, Adam had custody of the gun since he is—in the eyes of the law—a child. A foot chase ensued. As one officer closed in on Adam, he was told to drop the gun and put his hands up.

It's critical to note the officer was over his left shoulder.

At a gap in a high wooden fence, Adam, holding the gun in his right hand, made a barely discernible underhand toss of the gun on the side of the fence not visible to the officer. Even in slow motion the action is hardly visible—never mind at a full-tilt sprint down a shadowy alleyway at two-thirty in the morning.

Having relieved himself of the gun, Adam begins to turn towards the officer, simultaneously raising his hands.

It was while doing this that he was shot.

If you're a member of the portion of society that acknowledges reality, it's completely likely that given the angles at hand, the pursuing officer never saw Adam dispose of the gun. With his last bit of visual data being that Adam had a gun, his turning toward the officer could only be construed one way.

If it is true with us, it is doubly true of officers in the pressure-cooker of a pursuit that we are rarely afforded the luxury of a slow motion replay before we make critical decisions. The officer didn't wantonly assassinate Adam Toledo. He was reacting to a lethal and immediate threat.

With canonization seeming set for this week, popular opinion sides overwhelmingly with Adam and his aged-based innocence. Mentions of his age far outweigh recitations of the fact that just minutes earlier he was randomly shooting at cars and was in possession of the gun.

Also lost is the fact that Adam decided to run, thereby initiating the chase and had disposed of the gun in as secretive a manner as he could manage.

Ask yourself: how would this story be different had Adam tossed the gun on the side of the fence visible to the police officer? It was a light-colored fence and the airborne gun would have been clearly-visible against it.

But Adam didn't. He was thinking like a gang-banger and sought to hide the evidence.

Also keep in mind this sequence played out in real time, not slow motion. Over a period of—perhaps—two seconds. It was a perfect storm of circumstance.

But before we re-name everything in Toledo's memory and declare March 29^th a national day of remembrance, I hope we give a few seconds to the realization that Toledo and Toledo alone set these events in motion when he decided to hang with Ruben Roman.

Once and for all it was a pitiable decision by a boy who had no business making it. But he's hardly the first person to die as a result of a bad decision. And he won't be the last.

Heartless? Maybe.

But I reserve my deepest, most gut-twisting sorrow for murder victims who are innocent. Which sadly, cannot be said of Adam Toledo.

The Shimmering Sentience of the Social Media Commentariat

In defiance of practically every 2021 social norm, they act as one. United in their unswerving belief that they alone know. That they alone understand. That they alone possess the power to divine the true nature of a given incident.

Yes, even in the absence of facts they are somehow able to puzzle-out what really happened, based on—I don't know—their biases? Their prejudices?

In the aftermath of the shooting death of a thirteen year-old Latino youth by the Chicago Police Department, social media exploded with accusations and finger-pointing. This is another example of systemic racism! This is another example of a police department out of control!

As a sign at a subsequent demonstration read “Stop Killing Us!”

Seriously? Is that what we're doing? Am I permitted an eye roll?

As actual facts have been made available, it has become apparent that Adam Toledo wasn't the virginal innocent Black Lives Matter and other activists have painted him as. He wasn't a “baby”. He wasn't a “victim”.

He was a wayward youth embarking on a path that predicted his violent death.

You see, young Adam had just entered into a gang-banger internship. That's why he was out at 2:30 AM on a Sunday night, accompanied by an over twenty-one accomplice and shooting at cars. The gunpowder residue on Adam's gloves proves as much.

Gang-bangers like to employ young'uns because they are far less culpable.

After a prolonged foot chase, young Adam chose to turn towards a police officer with gun in hand. Acting in kind, that police officer shot Adam in the chest. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Go ahead. Call me a hater. Call me a racist. Even worse, call me a podium-pounding law-and-order Republican.

But I can't get too broken up about the death of a gang-banger-in-training. Sorry.

The intuitive geniuses on social media clearly know better. You know, the kind who believe that every police shooting of a person of color is unjustified and absolute proof of systemic racism. The kind who carry hysterically overblown signs reading Stop Killing Us!

I wonder if it has ever occurred to them that they act as blindly and as recklessly as the police they accuse.

I pity the decisions young Adam made. I pity the Chicago Police Department officer who will have to live with this memory for the rest of their life. I pity Adam's parents. I pity his family. No one is doing a jig.

And yet, Adam is a victim only in the sense that he fell prey to the world's worst role model—the ghetto. He was seduced by illusory images of gang life as being fatally and tragically heroic. That dying young would make him a martyr. 

I regret he will forever be unable to apply its final lesson.

Instead of making false and wildly misguided accusations, let's combat the reason why kids find gangs so alluring. Let's give them a sense of belonging that isn't centered on murder and mayhem.

Ya think?

Happy to Be Wrong

Several months ago, I expressed doubt that Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who shot an eighteen year-old African-American male sixteen times in the back, would ever see the inside of a prison cell.

Given the numbing regularity that cops are exonerated in such cases, I had little reason to think otherwise. But justice prevailed, and Van Dyke was found guilty yesterday of second-degree murder and sixteen counts of aggravated battery—a count for each bullet.

This isn't a celebration. Perhaps 'relieved' would have been a better word choice for the title of this post. I wonder if Van Dyke had it to do over again, would he have reacted differently? He has to know that as a former cop in prison, his life will be very difficult. I pity him.

Yet it has become a cliche to say cops have tough jobs. We all know that. As officers of the peace, their job is to de-escalate situations, not escalate them.

And the behavior exhibited by the responding officers, from Van Dyke's over-reaction to the conspiracy of the cover up to the stream of lies about what transpired on Pulaski Road that night doesn't speak well of the Chicago Police Department.

To be sure, Laquan McDonald was a troubled young man with only a faint sense of direction and purpose. He is another victim of the most hideous incubator of young lives the United States can offer—the ghetto.

But that is not in and of itself a crime.

As is the nature of things, we don't hear about the school bus that safely delivered two dozen schoolchildren to their homes. Or the construction crew that successfully secured dozens of support beams to the framework of a sixty-story high-rise.

Or of the cops who routinely arrest the bad guys while safeguarding the good ones.

But like surgery, when police work goes wrong it is often fatal.

Consider the cost of this event. A young man dead. A cop's life destroyed. Families left with a giant hole at their center. Police who must routinely confront the worst our society has to offer left with a chip on their shoulder.

The best we can hope for is that this proves to be a watershed moment. One that shines a light on the ocean of men in our ghettos who have little to live for, and the effectiveness of the police who encounter them every day.

God I Love This Country!

In light of our most-recent NRA-enabled mass shooting (this one in Annapolis, Maryland), I humbly and respectfully submit that this should be the NRA's new tag line:

If You Don't Want to Die, Don't Be Born.

I will also send my most sincere and profound thanks to them for their assistance in ensuring that all Americans, regardless of age, class, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender or country of origin, have the right to die at any time in any place for no reason whatsoever.

Go ahead—ask yourself: where would we be without them?

Choosing Targets

I'm no fan of hunting. Especially by guys with fat wallets and full stomachs. And yet, the case of Walter Palmer, the lion-killing dentist, bothers me.

Walter Palmer isn't a poacher. He's not Kim Davis. He paid lots of money and went through all the proper channels to arrange his safari. He did everything he could to ensure his trip fell within the boundaries of Zimbabwean law.

Not being a local, he couldn't have known his guides were something less than conscientious, and would stoop to luring the lion known as Cecil from a nature reserve with food, setting it (and Palmer) up for assassination.

Palmer isn't the first person to go to an exotic land and shoot an animal. He isn't the first to look at a magnificent creature and see only a trophy for the wall of his den, confirming to all the unquestionable masculinity of the inhabitant.

Which is why I feel the avalanche of protest generated by this event is all out of proportion to the event itself. It's like ostracizing someone because they received a speeding ticket.

However you—or I—feel about hunting, it's legal. The worst thing Palmer did was hire guides with a very casual relationship with the law. Singling him out and making him the poster boy for centuries of reckless and destructive big game hunting is wrong.

As our mothers told us, two wrongs don't make a right. Morality is not algebra.

I am more deeply-disturbed by the wholesale habitat destruction and plunder wrought by China's newly wealthy population, a population which is roughly four times that of our own habitat-destroying and plundering one.

I can't look at a tiger, knowing its singular majesty is consigning it to extinction in the wild. I can't forget Tatiana, a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo who died a death as grotesque and unfair as Cecil's.

I am not unsympathetic to animals or the people who love them.

But in the wake of Palmer's prolonged vilification, I am tempted to say he is as big a victim as Cecil.

If it is the laws we hate, then we should change the laws. If it is the attitudes we hate, then we should change the attitudes. Let's redirect this avalanche of energy towards making hunting—if not illegal—a little less-attractive.

Let's spearhead a you're-not-what-you-kill movement. Make sure the only shooting we do of wildlife is with cameras.

If we want fair, we must first exhibit fairness.