Egberto Willies
Last week Jon Stewart had an "impromptu theme" of social injustice. In one his skits he enumerated all the black males that were killed by police recently. In the process of his enumeration he had a bad call. It turned out according to the coroner's report that Dante Parker died from from drugs in his body and not from police action. This was according to San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos. "District Attorney Ramos is right," said Jon Stewart. "We were wrong. In our list of unarmed black men shot by police we should not have included Dante Parker, who according to the county medical examiner, died of a PCP overdose. So I am sorry about that. We should not have done that."
For that mistake Jon Stewart points out an interesting thing. "Now rather than having to have the uncomfortable conversation about a judicial system that may be biased or a disturbing pattern of unarmed black men being shot by police or a certain element of militarization and force that has crept into certain aspects of law enforcement culture—my stupidity, my sloppiness. I did this to me.—can become an opportunity to negate that entire conversation and shift it back to slightly safer, let's say less nuanced ground."
Jon Stewart then goes on to show how Fox News used his mistake to change the subject from the real issue of social justice for a segment of the population to Stewart somehow attacking police. He found it kind of ironic. "You see, that's what's tough about working in media 'countererrorism.' The Daily Show has to be right 100 percent of the time. Fox only has to be right once."
Stewart continued to show Fox News hyperventilating as they made him seem anti-police. Stewart's response is what should be heeded. "You can truly grieve for every officer who has been lost in the line of duty in this country and still be troubled by cases of police overreach," he said. "Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want then to be held to high standards. ... The point is this: Raising these issues is not the same thing as denigrating the police. It's a plea to push past the defensiveness and try to get to the reality and make things better."
Americans ought to better look at the adoration some have for police. Our police reflect the same ills within society. Some are good. Some are bad. Elevating them to the absoluteness of good lay the groundwork for a police state as check and balances are no more.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
More Merton Quotes
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