I am sorry.
Is that an arrogant title?
We are supposed to be philosophical and sociological and understanding. We are supposed to think that the young, black people who burned down much of Baltimore yesterday are merely responding to the circumstances of oppression that they live within.
We are supposed to believe that the United States is a highly racist country and that if we don't want well-deserved resistance from a beleaguered community then we better stop keeping them under the jack-boot of white, western racism.
As I often do, I turn to Daily Kos in order to get American left-leaning views on such things.
Although, I have to say, this piece, entitled Powerful video interview of Crips & Bloods disputing the claims of the Baltimore Police is particularly weak and I am a bit surprised to find it on the front page.
Nonetheless, from the comments:
doroma has faith in the Crips and Bloods.
shocking....but I believe the gang over the cops (7+ / 0-)Words in Action thinks that it's all perfectly reasonable:
at this point. In 2015, cops scare me ! They lie to cover up their crime.
When the authorities (2+ / 0-)Indeed, what else can people of good will do under such circumstances - whatever those circumstances are, exactly - other than burn down their neighbor's grocery store?
concede nothing and the broad middle fiddles in complacency with its dislike of conflict and discomfort, what alternatives are left?
freemark, in a different diary by a well-known user, thinks that rioting and burning down buildings and fighting the police is something akin to banging a golf club against a tree:
Have no trouble breaking a golf club (29+ / 0-)Because the inclination to burn down, or blow up, one's own neighborhood is psychologically akin to breaking a golf club.
The same people who break their own golf clubs after a bad tee shot refuse to understand why a small minority of people damage their own community after being abused and murdered by the people who are supposed to be protecting and serving them.
Karl Rover has an interesting take:
I was disappointed by the comments (27+ / 0-)Got it. The rioters are "peaceful protesters" and the cops who seek to protect the community from the rioters are themselves looters and rioters.
that plainly said that the peaceful protesters were the looters.
There is more of a correlation with police riots and looting.
I have to say, as someone concerned about the long Arab war against the Jews, this kind of unjust inversion sounds very familiar to my ear.
This, however, from AKBear gets to the heart of the matter:
When all you see around you (75+ / 0-)75 uprates. That is quite a few. In fact, that is an enormous number of uprates for a comment beneath an article.
are the companies that take your money and only offer a pittance for a wage, then you can understand the rioting.
When all you see around you are the forgotten and underserved in the richest countries in the world, then you can understand the rioting.
When all you see are people losing their homes because basic repairs and maintenance have not been done in decades, then you can understand the rioting.
In other words, what AKBear is saying is that the United States is such a horrible place - and the western system of liberal capitalism is so awful - that it is perfectly understandable why poor people "of color" riot and burn down their own neighborhoods.
This is what I like to call, in academic parlance, total bullshit.
My father grew up in a poverty-stricken mixed neighborhood in Brooklyn called Flatbush.
My grandmother, Sarah, carried my baby father through Ellis Island after leaving her dead husband behind in Argentina because they could not, initially, even get visas into the United States from the Ukraine.
She literally scrubbed floors at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York in order to take care of herself and my father before she remarried.
It never occurred to my father or his friends - despite the fact that as a teenager he was once fired from a job for observing Passover - to burn down their own neighborhood in righteous protest.
They figured that the thing to do was get into college.
