Baltimore. Ferguson. Is Cleveland next, with the further investigation of the Tamir Rice shooting?
No one is innocent in these situations, no one is 100% guilty.
There is no right, there are only many wrongs.
This is more about economics than race, except that non-whites are over represented in the lowest economic strata, so it becomes about race. People protest police brutality, and they should. Cops are scared, and I see why they are. Who loses the most? Not those who have died, but those who loved them and live on with that hole inside that can never be filled.
If I lived in Baltimore, I can’t say I wouldn’t have wanted to destroy something yesterday. I can’t say I would have.
I’ve been a part of a similar protest, way back in the 90’s in Lexington. A cop shot a young black man through a closet door and killed him. People marched on city hall that day, and I did too. I was thanked. I was told I wasn’t welcome, because I didn’t understand.
I hate that people have formed uninformed opinions on either side, because this is the classic Hemingway conundrum: You don’t know how you will react to a situation until you are in it, even if you’ve been there before.
I don’t condemn, nor do I condone. After all the intervening years, I guess I still don’t understand, and that’s wherein lies the answer. Complex issues can’t be solved in a soundbite, and that’s the world in which we live.
I know that the root causes on both sides of yesterday’s riots, any social unrest, come from fear. Fear of the other, fear of the future, fear of the unknown. I know that getting police out of cars and walking their beats would help. It’s one thing to deal with a stranger, either way. It’s another when Officer Jones is talking to Johnny who lives on Main, whose mother works around the corner. Either way, it becomes more personal, less “us vs. them.”
Maybe it’s naive to believe it makes a difference, but I do believe it. A familiar face and a name have more impact than a nameless badge or a faceless bandana.
Hate’s biggest strength is ignorance. It’s harder to hate that which is known, someone who is familiar.
This truism is from an awful movie, but fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.
We saw it yesterday, and we saw it in Ferguson. We are going to keep seeing it until we peel back the layers and address those fears … Or so I fear.
Andy Foltz is a freelance journalist in Northern Kentucky and reports frequently for the nkytribune.com.