Rhyming History

Here's an apt quote for the day, one often mis-attributed like so many others, to Samuel Clemmons, aka Mark Twain:

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The following is an even better quote which is in fact from Mark Twain:

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

Re-examinging one of the most famous and significant chapters in Chicago history in preparation for a forward to a book I have been asked to write, I've been struck by how issues that tore our city and country apart almost one and one half centuries ago, still resonate today. Not that we re-construct history brick by brick, but it's clear that we create the same problems for ourselves over and over and over again.

The event is the Haymarket Affair, the late nineteenth century struggle for workers' rights which led to a disastrous confrontation between workers and the police on May 4th, 1886. Eight police officers and an untold number of protestors died as a result of a bomb thrown toward a phalanx of officers as they tried to break up an otherwise peaceful rally in Haymarket Square on the near west side of the city. The business community as well as the general public, who were influenced by biased and incendiary coverage in the local media, were shocked and appalled by the deaths and demanded that the organizers of the event, most of whom were not even present when the bomb went off, pay with their lives for the deaths of the police officers. Even though the identity of the bomb thrower was never known, four men, all well known leaders of the workers' rights movement, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer, went to the gallows on November 11th of the following year. A fifth defendant, Louis Lingg, cheated the hangman by committing suicide the night before his scheduled execution. Three other defendants had their sentences commuted and were eventually pardonned.

Today the trial that condemned the five men known to this day the world over as the Haymarket Martyrs, is by and large considered a sham, a show trial, and a gross miscarriage of justice, with neither the judge nor the jury making any attempt to disguise their prejudice against the defendants and their cause.

Obviously we don't hang people anymore for allegedly inciting riots, so we're not, literally at least, repeating that part of history. Yet reading about the buildup to the Haymarket Affair, one cannot help but see the connection to current events such as pitting the rights of one group of people against another, the role and the mistrust of police in society, and most important, the resentment, fear and sometimes outright hatred of newly arrived immigrants to this country. In fact the anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by prominent members of nineteenth century society, while perhaps a trfile more bellicose, seems to hauntingly reflect the statements of some current day pundits on the subject .

Consider these words from lead States Attorney Julius Grinnell in his closing argument at the Haymarket trial. Describing how scores of working people in Chicago, mostly German and Bohemian immigrants would react should the "jurymen unjustly acquit the anarchists", Grinnell told the jury...

...all the slimy vermin who have taken cover in the holes and byways of the city during this trial, will flock out again like a lot of rats.

That statement was met by a cheer of approval from spectators at the trial as well as from members of the jury.

A particularly vocal critic of the workers movement was former Chicago mayor and owner of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill who once wrote in an editorial in his paper about the day when he joyfully imagined:

...communistic carcasses decorating the lamp-posts of Chicago.

Granted the threat of violence from the workers as witnessed by the Haymarket Riot was real, but much of it was a reaction to violence committed agaisnt striking workers by the police and by private security companies hired by the companies they were striking against. In fact the May 4th  Haymarket rally was a direct response to the killing of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works complex on the south side the day before. Parsons and Spies, who had both been radicalized by the brutal treament of striking workers, spoke at the rally. It is said that Spies only agreed to speak if the mention of protestors arming themselves was deleted from pamphlets advertising the event. After Parsons spoke to the assembled crowd, he left the rally and was not present at the time of the bomb blast. One of the condemned, George Engel, was at home playing cards during the entire event. Only two of the Haymarket defendants, Spies and Samuel Felden who was speaking at the time the police began their advance on the crowd, were present at the time of the blast.

So what was all the fuss about? The issue was fairly simple; the over-riding concern of the workers was the enofcement of a state law banning companies from forcing their employees to work more than eight hours per day. That law which was put into the books in 1867 had no teeth, and was consequently all but ignored. The argument of the industrialists was that no one was forced to work for them and there were plenty of people in those economically depressed times willing to replace striking workers. The argument of the workers, who were paid on average $1.50 per day which was cut by 25 cents during particularly difficult times, was that such demanding hours, often 12 to 15 hour days, six days a week, essentially enslaved the wage earner to his job which didn't provide him the time to develop other skills in which he could enrich his life and better his situation. In other words, the struggle was between the rights of the capitalists to make the rules in their own compnies and the rights of the workers to earn a fair and living wage under reasonable and humane conditions.

Like Spies and Parsons, the newly arrived immigrants from central Europe and Scandinavia, many of whom were already aquainted with the work of Karl Marx and other writers promoting radical change, were deeply concerend by the over-zealous reaction of the powers-that-be, and the ruthless sometimes deadly force used against them by the police. The few who chose to arm themselves, admittedly encouraged by people like Spies and Parsons, did so for their own self-defense.

Not surprisingly, native born Americans, many of whom could only claim one or two generations of American ancestry themselves, reacted bitterly to this new wave of immigrants. Because of the relative few who committed violent acts, they painted all immigrants who came to these shores with the simple intent to better their lives, with a very broad brush, protraying them as  interlopers who seemed hell-bent on destroying the American way of life.

Sound at all familiar?

A Sniper in Dallas

Where have I heard those words before?

Back in college drama class, our teacher asked if anyone knew who J.D.Tippit was. Only one person raised his hand. It was my life-long obsession with the JFK assassination that enabled me to know that Tippet was the Dallas police officer who was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald (although JFK conspiracy theorists would beg do differ on that point), during the manhunt for the killer of President Kennedy.

The point of the question was to examine the nature of Classical tragedy whose subjects were inevitably the high and mighty, not your average Joe. In this case: the deaths of two people in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 were intrinsically tied together. Both victims were shot by the same man (allegedly), both were World War II veterans roughly the same age who left behind grieving wives and small children. In the general sense, both deaths were tragic, yet one sent shockwaves around the world and has been recorded in history as a major event in American if not world history. The other decedent, while receiving some press coverage at the time of his death, has gone on to become a historical footnote. Scores of articles, books, films, plays, even an opera have been written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As far as I know, not a single book, let alone opera has been written about J.D. Tippet. By virtue of position and his tragic end, one name to this day is known by the majority of people on the planet while the other name is known, as my classroom experience nearly forty years ago proved, by only a shrinking handful.

There is one concession to the dead policeman and his place in history, a historical marker in Dallas commemorating Tippit and his sacrifice, although it took 49 years to build it. At its unveiling in 2012, a state official said:

Officer Tippit did what hundreds of Dallas police officers do and have done every day... He did his job, and as a result he gave the ultimate sacrifice, and we as a community should never forget what happened on that day.

Sadly we'll be hearing similar words in the weeks to come, describing the five Dallas police officers who were ambushed during an otherwise peaceful demonstration, protesting the deaths of several African American men across the country in recent years, killed by police officers. The most recent of these deaths happened just this past week, one in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, the other in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And like the deaths of Officer Tippit and President Kennedy, the deaths of officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith, will be intrinsically connected to the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and dozens of other African American men who died at the hands of police in the last couple of years.

While each of those deaths is equally tragic, there is a disconnect between the deaths of the police officers and the men killed by the police. Rather than placing equal weight on every loss of life, to many individuals in this country, the narrative of these men's deaths will be colored by the political ideology of the individual.

For some, the men who were killed by the police were resisting arrest, they may not have deserved to die, but definitely played a role in their own deaths. For others, the Dallas police officers may or may not have themselves done anything wrong, but all police are in some way complicit in the abuse of their authority and the institutional racism that is a part of their profession. To some, the violence against police brutality, especially as it exists in relation to the African American community, while not acceptable, is understandable.

As has been the case in this country for a long time, national tragedies such as these, instead of bringing us together as they should, have hardened hearts and torn us even more apart. The disconnect between the African American men killed by the police in recent years and the police officers killed in Dallas last Thursday night, is a perfect metaphor for the hardening divide we are experiencing in this nation today.

It is that divide that prevents individuals from thinking clearly and forming rational opinions. It's true for both the left and the right. We've slipped back into the habit of labeling people as groups rather than recognizing them as individuals. To some, all police are corrupt, brutal and racist; to others, all black people have the potential for violence.

That is the reason why every civilian death at the hands of police is treated equally by some. As I pointed out in my post about Laquan McDonald last November, that is a mistake. As you may recall, McDonald was a Chicago teenager on a vandalism spree who was shot sixteen times by an Chicago Police Department officer. From a video of McDonald's death taken from a police car dashboard-cam, it is very evident that while the teenager was indeed resisting arrest, he posed no imminent threat to anyone, including the officers on the scene. The cop who emptied his gun into McDonald and was re-loading when his partner told him to hold his fire, has been charged with murder and is awaiting trial.

The McDonald case, along with its subsequent cover-up by the CPD and the City of Chicago to me represents nothing less than the most egregious example of governmental malfeasance and criminal behavior on the part of the police. However, in each of the other well documented cases over the past several years, many of which were also documented on video, none were so clear cut. That is not to say the killings were justified, rather from the evidence presented, the acts of the police and the victims were ambiguous, and different interpretations of their motivations and actions are possible. While every civilian death at the hands of the police is a tragedy, no two are the same, nor should they be treated as such.

It has been pointed out that African Americans and other minorities are singled out by the police and treated differently from whites. The people making these claims have a point, but the extent to which that is true is debatable and the issue has been grossly over-simplified by the press and social media over the past few years.

Of the 484 people killed by the police in this country so far this year. 238 of them were white, and 123, or 25 percent of them were black. That number is still disproportionate to the population of African Americans in this country which stands at around 13 percent. In all fairness, it must also be pointed out that violent crimes (including the murder of police officers) are committed by African Americans in numbers disproportionate to their population as well. The reasons for this are many, but it is still an indisputable fact. It is also a fact that the victims of violent crime are disproportionately black. It should surprise no one that there might be a cause and effect relationship between the crime rate in the black community and the response from police, yet a casual observer whose source of news comes from one particular point of view, might assume that police only harass and kill black people in this country, while white criminals are given a free pass. The numbers simply do not support that assumption.

That is not to say that horrendous injustices involving the police do not take place far too often in this country. On the other hand, it is simply wrong to lump all police men and women together as brutal, racist thugs who abuse their authority.

The deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling last week bring a new dynamic into the picture. Unlike many of the well publicized deaths of black individuals at the hands of law enforcement officials, these two men were armed with guns during their confrontations with the police. Castile was stopped in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, on the pretext that his car had a broken tail light; the cops apparently thought he matched the description of a robbery suspect. In order to avoid any misunderstanding. Castile responsibly informed the officers that he had a valid conceal/carry permit and in fact had a gun in his possession. When he reached (presumably) for his drivers licence as requested by one of the officers, the other officer opened fire (again presumably) assuming Castile was reaching for his gun. Castile's girlfriend and her four year old daughter were in the car at the time of the shooting.

Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside a food store in Baton Rouge. Someone, reportedly a homeless man, approached Sterling asking for money. When the man persisted, Sterling allegedly produced his weapon, prompting the man to phone the police. When they arrived, a struggle ensued and Sterling was shot when the cops discovered his gun.

As individuals carrying weapons presumably for their own protection, both Castile and Sterling it would seem, would be poster children for the gun crowd, who advocates the arming of private citizens. But the NRA has remained uncharacteristically silent after their deaths. No cries of foul that the police violated the men's civil rights to bear arms were sounded. Now it's true that Sterling as a convicted felon, could not have legally obtained a carry permit, but all indications lead to the fact that he was carrying the weapon for his own safety. Castile as we saw was authorized to carry a gun and was well within his legal rights.

So why the silence from the NRA? Is it because as some people suggest they are a racist organization who would have cried bloody murder had Castile and Sterling been white? Or do the tragic deaths of these two individuals serve as yet another reminder that the stance that we'd all be safer if we carried a gun is ludicrous? I suppose only the NRA knows the answer to that question and they're are not talking.

Finally there was the terrible shooting in Dallas where a former soldier opened fire and killed five police officers and injured many more, including civilians, apparently in retaliation for the killings of black men across the country by law enforcement officials. Ironically, the Dallas Police Department has a relatively good record when it comes to its relationship with the sizable African American community of that city. Not to go into a psychological profile of the killer, but it seems clear to me that like so many Americans, he was swept into a frenzy because of the current obsession of the press and social media, concentrating on the misdeeds of cops toward the African American community, without putting them into context.

A video that has gone viral shows a black woman from St. Louis commenting about violent protests that took place in her city over an African American man who was shot and killed by police after he pulled a gun on them. That same evening she points out, in the suburb of Ferguson, a young black girl who was doing her homework, was killed by a stray bullet that came from a gun used in a drive-by shooting that found its way into her bedroom. Not a soul protested the little girl's death. The truth is far more black people die at the hands of other black people in this country than by police. Yet in some circles, this is irrelevant as it is apparently not an appropriate topic for discussion.

Then there are the guns. The events of last week showed time and again how ridiculous is the notion that civilians carrying guns in public is a good idea. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile lost their lives because they were carrying guns. And it took an army of well trained, heavily armed law enforcement officials, with the help of an exploding robot to bring down the Dallas sniper. Imagine if armed protesters at the demonstration had decided to do a little freelance police work on their own, no doubt dozens of innocent people would have died. Instead, the civilians at the protest, many of whom we can assume were armed (it was Texas after all), ran for their lives, which turned out to be the sensible thing to do.

The pro gun crowd constantly complains about folks on the other side who use a terrible tragedy to promote their anti-gun agenda. Well it turns out terrible tragedies involving guns are occurring at a rate of about two or three per week these days so tell me, where is the opportunity to talk openly about guns when no such tragedy occurs? They say that laws restricting guns only affect law abiding citizens, since criminals who by nature of their being criminals, aren't going to be concerned about following any law. Fair enough. But consider this: our ever increasing relaxation of laws prohibiting firearms has a direct effect on the number of weapons manufactured. No one knows for sure but most data suggests there are more guns in the United States (approximately 300 million) than there are people. It has also been estimated that there are about twice as many guns today in this country than there were fifty years ago. Criminals don't make their guns themselves, they either buy them or steal them. And the overwhelming supply of guns in this country makes them ridiculously cheap and easy to get, including weapons of mass destruction like the semi-automatic assault rifles used in the Orlando mass shooting a few weeks ago, and in Dallas last week. Those guns are capable of discharging as many rounds of ammunition per minute as the shooter is capable of pulling the trigger.

As for the idea of "good guys with guns", well as someone put it in an online comment, the Dallas sniper, a U.S. Army veteran, was once a good guy with a gun.

Let's face it, we have many serious problems in this country, and finger pointing, marching and posturing, satisfying as they may be to the people who engage in them, aren't going to do much good. These problems, just like the deaths mentioned above, are all interconnected; cherry picking one problem or another based upon our political convictions simply will not work. We can't address the abuse of police authority without also addressing black on black crime, white privilege, and racism. We can't address racism or black on black crime without addressing poverty and a lack of jobs and education in the black community. We can't address those issues without addressing issues like the rapid decline of the two parent family and the idea of personal responsibility. We can't address the issue of crime and violence without addressing all of the above AND the availability of guns. And like it or not, we can't address the issue of the availability of guns without addressing the issue of how we can control the sale, manufacture and possession of firearms without violating constitutional rights. Until we find a way to listen to the other side, work out our differences, be willing to compromise, and honestly come to terms with issues that are inconvenient for us, we can only expect more of the same.

All the catchy slogans in the world aren't going to solve any problems. Yes I get it, black lives do matter and guns don't kill people, people kill people.

It's just so much more damn complicated than that.

Our Turn

Add Laquan McDonald to the tragic list of young men whose violent deaths over the past year have caused a public outcry over police brutality and the perception that men of color are targeted by law enforcement authorities in cities all over the United States. Beyond the race of the decedents and the occupation of their killers, there are few similarities in the number of deaths at the hands of the police, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, a suburb of St. Louis, Eric Garner in New York City, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Jamar Clark in Minneapolis and now McDonald in Chicago. All were involved in petty criminal activity at the time of their deaths, all resisted arrest during confrontations with the police, and all but McDonald were un-armed.

Of all the cases, the one of McDonald, a 17 year old who was killed on the southwest side of Chicago in October of 2014, stands out in starkest contrast. For starters, his story did not become a full blown media event until last week, more than a year after his death. The attention came after a lawsuit was filed that forced the City of Chicago and the Chicago  Police Department to release a video made from a camera mounted aboard a police vehicle which recorded the shooting of the teenager.

It's understandable why the CPD and the city didn't want that video released. In the soundless video, we see McDonald surrounded by police vehicles. He walks away from the camera in the direction of the two cops pointing their guns at him but veering away from them to the right. At no time is he any closer than 15 feet from the officers. Then he suddenly drops to the ground and you can see puffs of gun smoke as the young man twists and turns on the pavement. You then see an officer kick an object (the knife) away from the motionless form of McDonald.

In the end, CPD officer Jason Van Dyke emptied his gun into McDonald, shooting him 16 times, most the the shots striking him after he was on the ground. When Van Dyke went to reload his gun with another cartridge, his partner, the cop who kicked the knife away from McDonald, apparently told him to hold his fire.

But that's only the beginning...

Shortly after the shooting, officers entered a Burger King that was close to the scene and asked to view surveillance video shot by a number of cameras mounted in and around the restaurant. The manager obliged and the officers spent about three hours alone with the video equipment. The next day when investigators returned to inspect the video, they found that about an hour of footage from the evening of the shooting had been deleted. Ironically what did survive were images of the cops inspecting and presumably, erasing video.

The police department continues to claim there is no "credible" evidence to prove that members of the CPD intentionally deleted the files that contained video that may have been pertinent to the death of Laquan McDonald, yet offer no plausible explanation for the missing video.

Furthermore, according to Craig Futterman, founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago and one of the plaintiffs responsible for the lawsuit forcing the release of the video, an eyewitness who screamed at the officer to stop shooting at McDonald after he had fallen to the ground, refused to leave the scene despite the insistence of police. She was taken into custody for a brief period of time and claims to have been "intimidated" and told that she "did not see what she saw."

This past Tuesday on the eve of the public release of the video, Officer Van Dyke was indicted on first degree murder charges in the death of Laquan McDonald. Why it took so long to press charges against the officer and release the video is complicated and the cause of much anguish about town in the wake of the events of this week.

The case of the death of Laquan McDonald could have fallen through the cracks and been forgotten had it not been for a confidential tip from an insider in the police department that brought Futterman's attention to the the police dashcam video which showed that the officer's contention that his life was threatened by McDonald was nonsense. On April 13, the Corporation Council of the City of Chicago, Stephen Patton announced to a panel of aldermen that an FBI probe, (joined by the Independent Police Review Authority and the States Attorney's office), on the shooting was underway. Given the severity of the case and the public climate relating to police vis a vis the African American Community, Patton recommended that the city settle out of court with McDonald's family to the tune of five million dollars. The city's finance committee and the full City Council agreed to the settlement.  Still, Mayor Emanuel and police commissioner Garry McCarthy objected to the public release of the video on the grounds of the FBI investigation into the case was still underway. In can also be assumed that part of their logic was to avoid the unrest that occurred in other cities around the US. For the record, Laquan's family also objected to the public release of the video of the murder of their loved one.

The public's response to the video was swift and predictable; the rage, understandable.

McDonald was behaving erratically, having been high on PCP at the time of his death. The young man threatened a person with his knife, which prompted the original 911 call to the police. He allegedly attempted to break into several parked vehicles and took police on a half mile journey through streets and alleys before Van Dyke shot him. Up until that point the police strategy was to corral McDonald using their vehicles to prevent him from coming in contact with passersby, while waiting for other cops to arrive with tasers which could have non-lethally subdued him. The video shows the police to have McDonald cornered when Van Dyke and his partner got out of their vehicle, guns drawn. Within seconds, Van Dyke opened fire.

While some police officers contend that the dashcam video does not tell the complete story of the tragic event, it is clear that it was unnecessary for Van Dyke to shoot McDonald once, let alone 16 times.

Since the release of the video there have been numerous peaceful demonstrations in the city. At this writing, the day after Thanksgiving, marchers are organizing on north Michigan Avenue, Chicago's prominent shopping district, on this, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Clearly this is an attempt to gain as much visibility as possible, drawing attention to an abominable injustice that took place and arguably continues. That is the inalienable right of free people in a free society.

How it all plays out is anybody's guess; hopefully the demonstrations will be peaceful, and the police will to keep their cool. The best thing that can happen out of all this is reform and a real dialog between the police and the communities they have been entrusted to protect. I think the last thing anybody wants, with the exception of some people who might hope to gain personal advantage from the situation, is to bring back the turmoil of the disastrous events of  Chicago, 1968.

Once again, the whole world is watching.


POST SCRIPT: The March up Michigan Avenue protesting the death of Laquan McDonald took place on (Black) Friday, November 27th. It came off without much incident from either side, the demonstrators or the police, and life has returned pretty much to normal on the Magnificent Mile. The protesters did manage to prevent shoppers from entering the stores on that street for much of the day which no doubt cost businesses a great deal in lost revenue on their busiest day of the year. The Reverend Michael Pfleger, one of the leaders of the march stated that shutting down the economy was the one thing that would get the attention of the powers that be. That may be true but one of the things overlooked by the good reverend and the marchers was the fact that the folks who were hurt most by the store closings were not the business owners who have plenty of resources to keep them going, but store workers, restaurant staffs and other working stiffs who depend on commissions and tips for their livelihoods. If poverty is indeed one of the core causes for much of the trouble experienced in our cities today, the shutting down of one of this city's biggest economic engines on its most important day seems to me at least, foolish and self-defeating.

A Little Schoolin'

The viral video du jour, actually three of them, show a white police officer grabbing a female African American high school student while she was sitting at her desk in class, then flipping the girl and the desk over and dragging both of them out of the classroom. Not surprisingly, these videos shot by fellow students in a South Carolina school on their cell phones has drawn universal outrage, and the reactions as we have come to expect from the right and the left of this country, are entirely predictable.

To one side, this is an obvious case of a racist cop egregiously overstepping his authority. To the other side, it's a case of a teenager disrespectful of education and authority, selfishly disrupting a class thereby denying her classmates the opportunity to learn.

These reactions came well before any context surrounding the confrontation were brought to light. After the actual facts were brought out into the open well... nobody changed their mind.

The facts, some of them at least, are these:

• During class, the student was either texting of having a conversation (eye-witness reports vary) on her cell phone and the teacher demanded she stop. She refused. (Score one against the student).
• After a standoff, the teacher requested help from a school administrator. The student refused to cooperate again. At that point the cop, a "resource officer" who was assigned to the school was called to the room. The officer asked the student several times to get up and leave the classroom. Again she refused. (Score another against the student)
• After unsuccessfully convincing the student to leave her seat and the classroom, the cop grabbed the girl who continued to resist. This resulted in the ugly scene in the videos described above. (Score one against the cop and the student).
• It was later revealed that the student's mother recently died and that the young woman was in foster care. (Score one for the young woman).
• It was also revealed that the same officer has charges pending relating to incidents of a similar nature involving students of color. (Score one against the cop).
• The officer's boss, the county sheriff, before firing him, released a statement that his employee was no racist as he is currently dating a black woman. (No idea how to score that one). 
• Defending his firing of the cop, the sheriff also said that the officer's actions were "not typical of the job I expect (him) to do." (Score yet another against the officer).

Heard consistently throughout the coverage of this incident is the opinion that nothing the student did, at least anything apparent from the videos, justifies the officer's actions. Perhaps this is true. However, two critical questions that desperately need to be addressed, especially by police and school officials are these: why are policemen permanently assigned to schools in the first place, and secondly, what exact actions ARE typical of the job(s) that officers are expected to do when someone flat out refuses to comply with an essential and perfectly reasonable request?

I think it's safe to assume that the teacher's and administrator's reason for calling in a policeman was to remove a disruptive student from the classroom so the class could continue. It's highly unlikely they expected the officer to council the student, offer her words of encouragement, or invite her to tea. They could have done that themselves, perhaps they should have. When all else fails, short of building trap doors or ejector seats in classrooms (hmmm, maybe not such a bad idea), the only way to remove a student who simply refuses to leave, is by using the threat of force, and when that fails, use force itself. That's why the policeman was called. If the student responds in kind with force, as was the case with this particular child, things can get pretty ugly, which they did.

It has been stated over and over again that the officer acted irresponsibly and perhaps even criminally in roughing up the student, but no one, not even the sheriff could offer any clues as to how the officer could have acted responsibly while still doing what was asked of him.

A policeman's responsibility beyond dealing with bad guys and wayward students is to use proper judgement and restraint, and to act according to the rule of law while carrying out those responsibilities. Like other people who are paid to do unpleasant work, we expect the police to do a job that most of us are unwilling and/or afraid to do. Clearly the school administrator and the teacher felt the need to remove this student from the classroom, yet they didn't want to perform the messy, perhaps job-threatening work themselves. Perhaps they should have tried harder before taking the draconian step of calling in the police officer.

I asked my resident authority on such matters, my mother, (a long time teacher, administrator and principal of a large inner-city elementary school) what she would have done. Without missing a beat she said that if a student was stubborn about leaving the class and making a scene, she would have had all the other students leave for the library and left the student alone in the classroom to sit and think about her actions without the benefit of an audience. Had the situation been handled in that way there would have been no need to call in the federales in the first place, no violence, no viral videos, and of course, no blog post.

In my book, the school officials are as responsible for what happened that day as anybody else. Calling in a police officer to handle a situation they probably could and should have handled themselves was only asking for trouble. Like I said, the officer was doing the job that was asked of him. Violent and ugly as those videos are, I am not in a position to judge if the officer acted inappropriately, and frankly with the unreliable information we have, I don't think most of us are.

As for the student, what if any responsibilities does she have? First of all I think it's reasonable to expect all students to act in the spirit of the class, if not by directly participating, then at the very least showing respect by refraining from disrupting the teacher and fellow students. Every student knows full well that using a cell phone in class is unacceptable. Except in an emergency, where the student should have excused herself from the class, there is absolutely no excuse for violating this obvious breach of common sense and respect for her teacher and her peers. It was the student's choice to violate both the spirit and the rules of the class by using her phone, refusing to stop when asked, and resisting the officer when he demanded she leave. Whether his actions were appropriate or not, the student brought upon the those actions entirely by herself.

This week, a friend of mine taught me a new word he encountered in his work in the field of social justice. That word is "de-opportuniteed", an adjective made up by social workers as a substitute for the term "at risk", used to describe children who have a good chance of falling between the cracks in society. The old term was neutral in that it didn't claim to place judgement on a child's circumstances, it merely flagged a problem. The new term by contrast explicitly states that the children in question are in their precarious position because something has been done TO them, thereby eliminating any trace of responsibility from the child.

Clearly we need to have compassion and empathy for children who lack the love, guidance, care and protection of a loving family. But there are two things that must be considered. First, not all "at risk" children are neglected by their families, and second, not all children with difficult backgrounds are at risk. At some point, all children regardless of their background must be taught to be responsible for themselves.

I see a great deal of harm in the attitude that this whole mess is entirely the responsibility of the officer and none of it belongs to the student. To me, that sends a very clear message to students all over the country that it is their right to behave exactly as they please in school, to ignore the demands of teachers, school officials and other authority figures, and that their education is entirely the responsibility of the school, and none of it their own.

And we wonder why we are falling behind the rest of the world in terms of education.

Finally, one last question has been raised over and over again in this discussion: "How would you react if that was your child?" To that let me state without any reservation that two of the most cherished people in my life are my son and daughter and if any harm came to them I would be devastated. While I refuse to lay a hand on either of my children in anger, I believe that in order to become engaged, successful individuals as well as good people, all children must be challenged to some extent in every aspect of their lives. At this point in their young lives, being a student is my children's job and they have the responsibility to do the best they can at that job. I think both of them understand that and both of them work very hard at school, even if they'd rather be doing something else.

To answer the question how would I feel if my kids were treated that way by a police officer: if one of my children at that age showed as little respect for their teacher, their education, their classmates and the police officer as the student in South Carolina did, then with much sorrow and regret I would have to say, yes, he or she would have had it coming.

#BLM

The other day I listened to an NPR interview with the woman who first put the hashtag in front of the slogan "Black Lives Matter", making those three words a public call to arms against the assault on the lives of African American people (mostly men) at the hands of the police and other individuals or groups entrusted with law enforcement. She expressed her discontent with the fact that the slogan has been appropriated by other groups who have replaced the word "Black" with whatever particular group they care to call out injustice against. The most recent controversy around the slogan has been the replacement of "Black" with the word "All". Several presidential candidates have made the mistake of proclaiming something so obvious that it doesn't need to be said at all. Those candidates, including Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, have been put in the peculiar situation of having to retract their claim that all lives matter.

This may sound like political correctness taken to its most ridiculous extreme but the funny thing is this, I get it. This country has a sad history of proclaiming that black lives do not matter, and there continues to be to this day, a divide between the treatment of black people in this society, and everybody else.

The righteous indignation over far too many deaths of individuals, most of them black, at the hands of the police, is justified in my opinion, The slogan, black lives matter rings loud and clear, standing on its own.

What I don't get is this. If black lives matter, why is the discussion of black people killed by other black people considered irrelevant to this conversation?

As an example, last year, 2014, Chicago had a total of 459 homicides. 353 of the victims, or 78.1 percent, were black. This in a city whose black population is around 32 percent. Of those murders that resulted in an individual being charged, 68.8 percent of the suspects were black.

In the same year, 17 people were killed by the police in Chicago. (I don't have the racial breakdown of the individuals involved or the circumstances of those killings). 17 deaths at the hands of the police in one city is certainly not a number to be discounted, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of homicides in Chicago last year.

To me anyway, these numbers suggest an epidemic of violence particular to the African American, and to a lesser extent the Hispanic communities of Chicago, which is a microcosm of the United States. We've been through this before, the causes of this epidemic are deeply rooted in history, racism, poverty, drugs, lack of opportunity, poor education, the dissolution of the family, lack of self-respect, and self-responsibility, the list goes on and on, depending upon the ideologies of the people you talk to.

The killing of black people by the police speaks to a brutal past, traces of which tragically exist to this day. But the grim reality of the present is that black people are dying at the hands of other black people at a staggering rate. All the indignation in the world directed at the police is not going to change that. Addressing one issue without addressing the other is either naive of intellectually dishonest.

But what do I know, I'm just an old white guy who should probably keep my mouth shut on this topic.

Here's what a black man has to say.

OK maybe this sports commentator doesn't have any more right to spout off on the issue than I do but I think his concern is valid: many seem to believe that the only black lives that matter are the ones that are taken by non-black people.

I'll add a new twist to the slogan. Saying that all black lives matter does not let anyone off the hook, not the police, the criminals or the politicians, not the community, its leaders, or the clergy, and not you or me. We don't live in a vacuum and that goes for our problems too. Pointing fingers or arguing about slogans won't solve anything. Only when we're able to honestly look at ourselves and talk to each other, especially those with whom we disagree, will we be able to start to address the issues that shape our community.

So far we're failing.