Leap of Illogic 101

 

     This was originally written in response to another ludicrous FaceBook meme intended to denigrate pro teams “taking a knee” in silent protest of inequality of use of force by police.

      It portrays a first responder to the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy and the text says words to the effect that "The cops rushed in, but where were the Pro athletes?" I couldn’t let it go, so here’s my response.

        Sometimes we see something so illogical that the lunacy passes some of us right by and we don’t think coherently what it might even mean. This is an example.

        Obviously racist in subtext, it implies that professional athletes (of all races, by the way) who protest the overwhelmingly unbalanced incidence of killing of unarmed black people by police are somehow wrong or ill-advised because they didn’t do the “other’ police job of rushing  toward danger and try to save lives, as Trump falsely claimed he did. His claims of “being there” actually refer to 2 days later and his claim of “sending 100 men" (he had none to send) is totally debunked by those who were there, especially the man in charge.

        Where to begin? Start with reality which is that there was a very rapid isolation of the area and even if the whole Mets, Yankees, Nets, Knicks, Jets and Giants teams had been on the spot, (and trained in crisis rescue and response which they were not) they would have rapidly been barred from entry, even if they had all had their own protective gear, since all such stuff was being used by real emergency personnel. So, the short answer was that they couldn’t “run into the WTC because they 1) weren’t there and 2) would have been barred from entry if they had been.

        The far sadder takeaway from this meme is that it is meant to imply that anyone who takes a knee in silent protest of  police murders of unarmed Black men and women is somehow a child of a lesser God than the cops, some of whom have been complicit in such killings.

        Sadly, I doubt that those who forward drivel such as this process these things logically. If they could or did they would be faced with the fact that they are subscribing to the idea that simply because one member of a group or one clade of a larger group)  behaves heroically (or dishonorably) , all members of that group are heroes (or vice versa). Sound stupid? That’s because it is.

        Let’s use a reductio ad absurdum to make the point. Senior Chief SEAL team leader, Eddie Gallagher, shot, killed and beheaded a 14-year-old girl, posing with her severed head while he smiled for a photo. His own team members, sickened by his brutality, reported him. Who acted honorably?  Can we conclude either that all SEALs are honorable or that they are all murderers? Of course not.

       Yet there are those who, ignoring reams of evidence to the contrary, have, for years, subscribed to the idea that all police are honorable men, and anyone who protests their demonstrable public murder is (take your pick) unpatriotic, stupid, racist, etc. This has gone on for years and it is only in the age of cell phone video that we now see the unassailable truth, which is that some police, like some SEALS, like their free rein to use violence waaay too much and some abuse that “right” to the point of murder. Sadly, much of this abuse of power is racially biased as well.

        So, in the light of years of such action with little or no improvement what are the afflicted to do?  It seems to me that silent protest during a song which really is played in public sporting events, more out of habit than rational reasoning at present, and which about half of the spectators, regardless of race, talk through or other-wise ignore, is relatively modest. 

         Remember this salient fact. For most of us, the actions of public entities (fire fighters, police, road crews, military, etc.) represent “government” at either its best or worst. When 4 cops publicly murder, or suborn the murder of, a man in handcuffs without interfering, many in the offended minority see that as being government sanctioned, whether or not that is the case.  

        One more time: many heroic first responders ran into harm’s way on 9/11, which civilians, even if they were there and wanted to, were prohibited from doing.  In Louisville, police shot and killed Breonna Taylor, shooting the un-armed medical tech 7 times while executing a no-knock warrant looking for evidence related to a drug house far from her home. This cock-up included an officer accused by his own department of "blindly" firing 10 rounds into Taylor's apartment from an outdoor patio. Are officers in both of the above cases “heroes,” worthy if adulation? The answer is obvious.

         We deserve better. Silent protest of murder seems mild, compared to the actions of those murderer cops who apparently, for folks who make up ludicrous memes like this one, are just “doing their job”, and the victims of their homicidal actions are just collateral damage. Really?