There are times when the media really does their best to sicken us all. This is one of those times as they obsess over the violence of a few in Baltimore while ignoring the violence far too regularly inflicted on the unarmed, fleeing or already subdued people that police officers are sworn to protect.
The conversation between Wolf Blitzer and Activist Deray McKesson in which Blitzer refuses to take "Yes" for an answer on the question of preferring non-violent protests to mindless angry destruction. The irony is, as McKesson pointed out in agreement with President Obama, there already were weeks of non-violent protests in Baltimore that the media ignored.
Truth is the cameras only show up when the burning starts.
“You want peaceful protests, right?” Blitzer began his interview by asking McKesson.
“Yes,” McKesson replied, then continued. “Remember, the people that have been violent since August have been the police. When you think about the 300 people that have been killed this year [by police] alone. Like that is violence.”
But Blitzer ignored his point and persisted in demanding McKesson agree, again, that he did not condone violence. “But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires—these are statistics,” Blitzer countered, robotically reading a police press release. “There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?”
“Yeah, and there’s no excuse for the seven people that the Baltimore City Police Department has killed in the last year either, right?” McKesson shot back.
But Blitzer again ignored his point. Continued over the flip.
Transcript via Rawstory.
“We’re not making comparisons,” Blitzer stuttered. “Obviously, we don’t want anybody hurt. But I just want to hear you say that there should be peaceful protests, not violent protests in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King.”
As if he hadn't already said that TWICE, Blitzer insists on his saying it again, and again and again. And the thing that Blizter obviously forgets is that there were many riots during the King era. There were the Watts Riots, there were riots in many cities on the day that Dr. King was killed, including
in Baltimore.
THE 1968 riots rank with the 1904 fire that wiped out much of the downtown business district and the state legislature's 1947 vote to prevent the city from annexing additional land as major events that changed the course of history for Baltimore this century.
In the early hours, the unrest didn't seem like a momentous event. The city was relatively quiet after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on the evening of #F Thursday, April 4. But by April 6, sporadic, isolated incidents had gained momentum. Teeming crowds gathered on Gay Street in East Baltimore and began breaking store windows and looting. By 6:45 that evening, then-Gov. Spiro T. Agnew had called out the National Guard.
So it's really a bit of revisionism and myth that the unrest, outrage and occasional violence of today was not present during the time of Dr. King. It certainly was.
People like to argue that we've come so far since that time, but situations like last night in Baltimore show that both from the side of how police behave with minority and poor citizens, and the various ways that people from those communities react, Both non-violently and sometimes with violence ... has not really changed all that much.
And that's something that Blitzer consistently fails to understand, and McKesson correctly schools him nicely on it.
“Yeah, there’s should be peaceful protests,” the community organizer replied. “And I don’t have to condone it to understand it, right? The pain that people feel is real.”
“And you are making a comparison,” McKesson added. “You are suggesting this idea that broken windows are worse than broken spines, right?”
“And what we know to be true is the police are killing people everywhere. They’re killing people here. Six police officers were involved in the killing of Freddie Gray, and we’re looking for justice there. And that’s real. The violence the police have been inflicting on communities of color has been sustained and deep.”
Broken buildings can be rebuilt, but broken spines can't. Looting and inconvenienced businesses are unfortunate, but lost property can be replaced, particularly if it's insured.
Lives destroyed. People disenfranchised, being rendered unemployable, parentless or childless by the drug war, the emotional trauma and terror that repeated police harassment and the constant threat of deadly violence has an impact on communities, and that impact
can not be undone. It remains, like an open wound that just keeps being repeatedly hit, and hit, and hit.
Time can not be unwritten, the dead can not be brought back to life.
We're not going to make progress in the nation on these issues, until the basic truth that lives are more valuable than property is not something you have to have an argument without someone in the media about.