There has been some attention in media recently regarding a
young man of 13 named CJ Pearson, and his rants re: President Obama. Mr. Pearson is African American. I won't reprint what he said, because of space
constraints. You can probably figure out what his issues are from my response..
If you feel the need to read his rant. I'll post a link at the bottom. you may
want to wash your hands after you listen or read it.
In response to CJ Pearson:
Hello, Mr.
Pearson. I'll call you that, offering you far more respect than you seem to
have for President Obama. I'm just an
old white guy who after reading your disrespectful rant, finally had 2 choices:
either respond or throw up. I chose the former.
Referring to a Harvard
Law graduate as "ignorant", "incompetent" and "unable
to grasp reality," is clearly a manifestation of some adult prompting, since I very much doubt
if any 13 year old has the capacity to consider the knowledge level or ability of
President Obama and evaluate it against some vague and undefined standard. But, set the name calling aside and
let's deal with what apparently are your "issues" with Mr. Obama. I
will refer to them as "your" issues but they certainly sound like more
like a Far Right talk show host's sound bites.
Your
first eight issues are sentences, which were spaced as paragraphs in the
version of "your" letter which I saw, and in reality deal with a
single issue. You are offended that the young man who built a clock and was
handcuffed and jailed temporarily because of it, was sent a short message from
the president, while the parents of young woman shot and killed in California weren't. To illuminate this ludicrous comparison consider the following.
In the last 72 hours as of this writing ten Americans have been shot to death. Should they all be invited to the White house?
So far in 2015, there have been 9,385
shootings in America. What room would you like those victim's families to use when
they meet the President - the Superdome? Of
course let's be fair: how many young boys have been thrown down and handcuffed
for taking a homemade clock to school? One? Good answer! Now add in the fact
that there is an unreasonable and ugly tendency in some circles to label
Muslims as all alike and all untrustworthy. So the President can say nothing
and make American Muslims, the vast majority of whom are law abiding citizens,
feel even more threatened, or he can, with a simple gesture, emphasize the
kid's brains and initiative. If you don't see one of these actions as superior
to the other, I can't help you. Yes, Mr. Pearson, you equate an unfortunately all too common occurrence
(the shooting) with a unique, one of a
kind event (the clock) and then cast aspersions on an action which was aimed
solely at easing tensions. Sound crazy to you? it does to me.
Most of the
rest of this is aimed at what is actually a gaping hole in your logic. You seem
to see criminals and cops as equals! To
begin with, what many on the Far Right simply will not admit is the simple truth
related to law enforcement. We expect bad guys to do bad things. They
always have and probably always will. The fact that they do, however, doesn't threaten to destabilize our society
along racial lines. On the other hand, we do not expect law enforcement officers to
be the bad guys and kill unarmed persons, suspect or not.
Considering the
history of police interactions with Black suspects in much of our nation for
the 150 years since the Civil War, this has frequently not been the case. If
you as a real, live 13 year old Black
male don't know this, your school has failed you! Based on personal experience as a young white
male living in a Black community in Baltimore in the 1960s, I can attest to the
fact that not much changed from then until now. The recent succession of White
Police killings of unarmed Black males became a national issue and media fanned
the flames until the President was essentially forced to acknowledge it.
He could have
said "Too bad, the cops are always right, tough." Would that have in
any way soothed tensions? Of course not. To fail to acknowledge, or even to
deny what many of us know to be true would have fanned the flames. Of course for many American whites, the
status quo was fine, since it was aimed in a sort of "understood"
agreement as keeping persons like you "in their place." So the President's calling for calm while
acknowledging that a problem exists, is only a problem for those who think
killing unarmed suspects, as long as they're poor or black, is fine and should
be status quo.
The simple
reality, whether you care for it or not, is that criminals commit crimes; it isn't particularly newsworthy and
doesn't cause tears in the fabric of society. But- when the law keepers become
the law breakers, and, for a change, it becomes common knowledge, that's
different. For a President, any President,
to appear to deny that it happened or that the dead guys "deserved it,"
would have been insanity, just as it was
when President Nixon blamed the dead
Kent State students in part for their own deaths.
What truly
saddens me is that many of those who post and positively review your tirades
actually have another agenda, that being to keep the tension between races and
religions on the high burner as we approach the next election. One only need
look at the hate speech of Trump, Cruz, and Santorum to see it. In 1915, they'd
have been in the Klan, now unfortunately they are mainstream hate mongers, and
they're using you.
What you and
apparently many others seem to miss is that the President's efforts in both
recognizing real police overuse of violence and attempting to sooth the "clock"
situation, are efforts to sooth tensions. Of course your rant is quite the opposite, isn't
it? Those who lived through the Civil
Rights movement era must be truly perplexed and deeply saddened by your having morphed into Ted Nugent.
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