Guilty Until Proven Innocent; When Proven Innocent, Start Rioting

*Please note that this blog is a place where I can share my thoughts and emotions freely. If the wording or tone of something I write displeases you, I'm sorry that you are displeased, but I am not sorry that what I wrote made you displeased. I don't really care, actually. If my words get you worked up, try doing some yoga or drinking some tea and listening to some soothing music. Or, just stop reading it. Thanks so much.

When it first erupted into public consciousness, it was impossible to avoid the Michael Brown case. It was everywhere you looked. Everyone had something to say about it, yet no one really had a clue what had happened. Was he running? Was he surrendering? What did he do to attract the officers attention in the first place? Was he a child or an adult?

Nobody seemed to have heard all the same details, but one thing somehow seemed obvious to everyone (or at least everyone who was being vocal about it): This was clearly a hate crime. A white police man would never have a reason to kill a black man that was not motivated by pure, unadulterated, racist malevolence.


No one seemed to consider that it was possible that Brown was not a victim, and that he was in fact responsible for his own demise. Everyone assumed it must have been police brutality because...I'm not actually sure why. I guess being able to say you're standing up to something is pretty sexy. Also, jumping on board the anti-police hype train is a cool way to earn social activism points in certain circles, so there's that, I guess.

However, I didn't make any assumptions at the beginning. Only an idiot would just assume that Officer Wilson's decision to shoot was racially motivated without seeing or hearing any evidence. And only an idiot would just assume that Michael Brown got what was coming to him, and that Darren Wilson was completely innocent.

For whatever reason, this particular case, out of the literally hundreds of arrest related deaths each year, made it into the public spotlight, and that meant discussions were going to happen. That's good. That's great, actually. I love discussions. Discussions are how we as a society learn from each other.

I just didn't want to be a part of these discussions surrounding this case.

I just couldn't take it. I'd seen this happen many times in the past, and every time I'd taken a vocal stance. With every national tragedy of the past few years I'd picked a side, been vocal on social media and in school or at work, gotten in arguments with friends, and accomplished nothing.

From the get go, I knew that this would be an incredibly divisive topic, and that on all sides of the issue, it would be the idiots who assumed things without looking at facts who would lead the discussions and nobody would get anything from it other than increased hatred and division.

So I let it go. I stopped following the coverage. I actually forgot about it completely. I figured that whenever a verdict was reached, I, along with all the similarly non-idiotic people in the country who did not rush to assumptions, would trust the jury's decision and rest easy knowing that justice had been served. I refused to get caught up in the bullshit and rhetoric and pseudo-activism.

This didn't concern me, so I did not need to have an opinion.

Fast forward three months. A unanimous decision is reached by the jury. Having seen hundreds of pictures and video clips, heard dozens of eyewitness testimonies, and heard Officer Wilson recount the story many, many times, the jury reached the decision that Wilson was totally justified in his actions.

Remember, this was a unanimous decision in a process that only required 75 percent agreement. No one was pressured into agreeing just to get the trial over with. Also, the jurors made what they knew would be a wildly unpopular decision with a crowd of violent mobsters, yet went forward with it anyway. It has also been announced that they will be releasing ALL the evidence used in the trial, so they must be pretty confident that the public will agree with their decision once they see what they've seen.

There really is no reason to distrust their decision, or the testimony of Officer Wilson. Remember, Michael Brown was a violent criminal, having hours before been on the wrong side of the law in a strong-armed robbery at a convenience store, and Wilson was an officer who had never before fired his weapon while on the force up until that fateful afternoon.

Unless you are a family member or friend of the late Mr. Brown, there really isn't any reason to still be publicly upset about this. Yes, a man died, but you didn't know him. He was in no way heroic. He was a thug, and he was killed during an assault on a peace officer. End of story.

So, my question to all of the protesters and rioters is this...

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

I had no personal investment in this case. I really didn't care much at all. For me, the more interesting and disturbing part of the story was the police departments egregious show of force in the wake of the protests, as if they were deliberately trying to stir up unrest in the city. I really, really, really, REALLY didn't want to comment on this.

However, the past few days have left me feeling sick and pissed off. I can no longer just sit silent while people I know and once respected are in the streets demanding that "justice" still needs to take place. Hello? It has! I know, I know, the kind of justice you want has nothing to do with the traditional, Constitutional form of justice. You want mob justice.

Literally the only two options I can think of for why someone would still think that Officer Wilson was a murderer and Michael Brown was someone worth commemorating.

Option A. They are from a parallel universe in which Darren Wilson was an openly racist monster, and Michael Brown was a peaceful and childlike saint. In this hypothetical universe, Officer Wilson gleefully executed the terrified Brown in broad daylight. Even though he openly admitted to and was proud of his murder, because this universe is one where racism is the law of the land and black people are still horribly oppressed, he gets away free. Somehow, people who were protesting that injustice have made their way over into this universe without realizing it, and have yet to see that in this present reality, nothing worthy of protest or outrage occurred on that day in Ferguson.

Option B. They are the idiots I was talking about earlier, who assumed that this was a racially motivated killing from the get-go, and even though they are now presented with the facts of what transpired, they are too intellectually dishonest to admit that they were wrong. Instead, they've decided to willfully ignore reality and live in their fictional world where they are part of a greater event that will be remembered in history as the spark the started the flame of the Second American Civil Rights Movement. This allows them to be ever so proud of themselves for being so socially aware and morally upright and shit, when in fact they are nothing more than ignorant and belligerent twits.

Seeing as I don't believe in parallel universes, I'm going to assume Option B about everyone I see who sides themselves with those who are burning down their own community in the name of "justice".

In our information age, no one who is vocal about this case can claim ignorance of the facts. At this point, literally everyone who is in the streets chanting, "Hands Up, Don't Shoot!" knows damn well that the only times Michael Brown raised his hands during the encounter was when he was pulling his fist back for another unprovoked blow on a police officer.

As for the strawman phrase, "Black Lives Matter"...of course they do! Nothing about the proceedings implies that anyone thinks they don't! It's really easy to attack an obviously unjust idea (i.e. black lives don't matter), but when it's an idea that none of your imagined opponents are putting forth, it makes you look like a jackass for stubbornly relying on it anyway.

I hate racism as much as any halfway decent person, and I recognize that there are still areas in our country where it has insidiously rooted itself, and it is absolutely worthwhile to try to stomp it out wherever it rears it's ugly head. However, it has become abundantly clear that the heart of Darren Wilson is not one of those places that it resides, so why are you still trying to stomp on him?

So my question is this: How will you be able to live with yourselves? When all this blows over, and you stop your tweeting and you hashtagging and your blustering, how will you sleep knowing you demonized and crucified an innocent man? Officer Wilson objectively did no wrong, but you needed an excuse for your pent up anger, so you stuck him with it.

You disgust me. I am thoroughly disgusted. This was an opportunity to start civil dialogues about racism and injustice, but you squandered it. Instead of moving on from the incident and acknowledging your overreaction, you clung to your desire to show all your Facebook friends how much you really care about Big Issues and Making A Difference, and now what?

Appropriate questions that could have arisen would be ones like, "What does the media's and public's assumption that a hate crime took place say about the overall cultural view of the police's relation to the black community?" Or, "Was the Ferguson Police Department's use of SWAT and military hardware and vehicles justified, and if not, why did they feel the need to do so?"

Lots of actual issues could have been discussed, but instead we have thousands of people chanting "Stop Killing Our Children" in the streets, as if casual murder of children by the police is something is a common enough occurrence to actually be an issue (it's not), or as if Michael Brown was even a child (not by any stretch of the imagination was he legally of physically a child).

I doubt this will change anyone's outward stance on the issue. No one who is protesting will read this and stop protesting. I just needed to vent. And I sincerely hope that even if you don't stop your ignorant persistence online, that inside, in your heart, you'll start to be convicted. I want you to know, deep down inside, that you are being ignorant and ridiculous and that you need to get the fuck over yourselves.

Michael Brown died. Any death is sad, but you are not helping. Just stop. Stop the charade. Stop trying to make a martyr out of a thug for a cause that is unrelated to the events.

Please.