Time for Outrage?
Outrage?
Where is it?
If the scenes from Oakland, New York, Denver, and now U.C. Berkley were filmed in St. Petersburg or Beijing or Yangon (Rangoon), there would be press conferences with our elected officials screaming their moral outrage. They would be on all the Sunday morning pundit/news shows talking with disgust about human rights violations. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would spend the week discussing what we as nation should do.
The same violations occur at home and it’s because the protesters are out of control, destroying and defacing property, disrupting a public space.
All of my life I’ve argued against the idea we’ve lost our way as a nation, have fallen from a time of higher moral thinking. I can no longer make that argument.
Make no mistake, I believe regardless of what you’re protesting if you break the law then you should be arrested. And in full disclosure my brother is a Garfield County Colorado Sheriff’s deputy and many of my friends are in law enforcement. I believe in the job they do to protect people.
However there is a line between protecting people and violating people and the heavy use of pepper spray in Berkley is violating them. Why? Because they were in a non-violent position, locked in unison. This is a standard non-violent protest tactic and at that point there was no reason to escalate the situation
I understand there was tension on the campus because of the shooting on Tuesday; however to a reasonable individual the two events are not linked. The authorities are wrong.
Every step we as a society stupidly take away from our Constitution and our belief in human rights takes us one step closer to something evil; either Marshall Law or Civil War that sounds extreme, but is it? When “We The People” become “We The Oligarchy” there is frankly little other outcome, right now the United States stands somewhere in between.
These are precious moments and we have to stand up.
It is time for outrage.
