Jaywalking is the example you give for the most minor offense possible under the law; it ranks up there with the “no spitting on the sidewalk” ordinances.
Jaywalking is a “summary” offense, like getting a traffic ticket, less than a misdemeanor, and carrying no jail time. If you get caught jaywalking, the worst that can possibly happen is that a cop will give you a ticket and you’ll pay a fine of $25 or so.
Well, unless you’re a young black male.
A few days ago, I posted the above video on my Facebook page, which caused quite a commotion. A cop arrests a kid for jaywalking to catch the bus, detains him, and then is seen beating the kid, who apparently fights back (as would anyone who is being beaten). Even then, the kid doesn’t run away, and the cop then calls over 8 more who surround the kid and harass him.
That’s all I know, based on the video. So I formed an opinion that the cops had tremendously overreacted over the most innocuous “crime” possible.
Some of my Facebook friends took me to task over this, complaining that I didn’t know the whole picture, and then they proceeded to come up with a bunch of possibilities that could have caused the officer to act this way.
Well, geez, I could do that too. What if the kid had fought the officer? What if he was seen with a weapon? What if the kid was actually a lizard space alien who had hypnotized the cop as part of a vast conspiracy to overthrow the planet Earth and steal our women?
Making up stuff to justify your already-held position is really easy to do.
Still, I was accused of being dishonest for making a decision about something when I don’t have all the facts.
Well, that’s how it works. You base an opinion on the facts you have before you. You don’t make up theories about stuff you have no evidence for. And if new facts emerge, you change your opinion to take those into account.
That’s the scientific method, usable in everyday life.
The problem is with people who make up “what if” scenarios to give them a conclusion opposite of all the facts before you. That’s a bit intellectually dishonest, if you ask me. While there is nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t have enough evidence to form an opinion yet” there is definitely something wrong with saying “I have an opinion but it’s not based on any facts we have right now.”
Then again, often these are the same people who will never change their minds when new facts emerge; they’re the ones who never let facts spoil their conclusions.
You can be ignorant. That’s not an insult. There’s nothing wrong with being ignorant. I, for instance, am ignorant of quantum mechanics, brain surgery, and fashion. Everybody’s ignorant about something, but ignorance can be cured by education.
You can also be stupid. While that is used as an insult, the fact is that some people, through no fault of their own, were not gifted with brains that work as well as they should.
But then you can also be willfully stupid. These are the people who deserve the insults they get.
The willfully stupid can be presented with proof, facts, and evidence and will refuse to accept it because they like being stupid. They won’t change their minds, and they want to hold on to their pre-conceived beliefs, prejudices, and views. They will continue to believe in ghosts, creationism, Bigfoot, astrology, moon landing conspiracies, and the magic of crystals in spite of the lack of evidence to support any of these things, and the mountain of evidence to counter them. And this is especially true of the politically willfully stupid.
Apparently my post from a few days ago where I decried the Republican party for turning into the stupid party has been supported by a new study showing that a majority of them still believe that Obama is a Muslim.
That’s right — the man who was abandoned by his black Muslim father and raised by his white atheist mother somehow decided to convert to being a Muslim while attending Christian churches and fooling everyone by not following a single one of the beliefs that Muslims hold dear. Clever, he is!
It’s no wonder this party is supporting candidates who appeal to stupidity while ignoring all facts that counter their already-held beliefs.
I predicted a while ago that the GOP would rally around one of the sane candidates, aware that they would have no chance with the crazies who want to run. I predicted Scott Walker, and maybe Jeb Bush.
Guess I was wrong. The GOP has become crazier and stupider than even I had imagined.
Scott Walker and Jeb Bush are doing terribly in the polls and Walker is about to announce that he is dropping out.
And the leading candidates among the Republicans left are the three least qualified of the bunch, not one of which has ever held an elective office.
There’s Donald Trump. His claim to fame is that he inherited money which he then used to get really rich while declaring bankruptcy a bunch of times. He spouts off hateful, racist, and sexist comments which his followers love because they say he’s “telling the truth.” I have an uncle exactly like that, but he’s not rich (although he has never declared bankruptcy). I have yet to understand why Trump is more qualified than my uncle.
Doctor Ben Carson also thinks it’s a perfect step to go from running a medical practice to managing the biggest organization in the history of the world. He hasn’t quite explained how he would be more qualified than any other random doctor you could find, but somehow his followers are thrilled with the hateful and downright stupid things he says, so he’s doing just fine.
Closing in fast is Carly Fiorino. She couldn’t get elected in her home state, and she got fired as CEO of Hewlitt-Packard after she ran it into the ground, so naturally she decided that made her eligible for the most important managerial job in the world. She’s a bald-face liar who makes up crap about Planned Parenthood that even Fox News calls her out on.
These are the front-runners, representing the worst parts of our society.
And that’s the key — somehow we have all underestimated the racism, sexism, homophobia, and downright evil of a large section of the Republican base.
It even surprises the Republicans.
At a recent rally, one speaker spoke about how wrong it was for liberals to mislabel the Tea Party. “When many people think of the tea party,” he said, they assume it is composed of “racist, homophobe, xenophobe, gun-toting radicals.” The room broke into applause, cheering that label. “Didn’t expect that,” the speaker said.
But that’s exactly who these people are. They’re happy to be racists, as they fly their Confederate flags and whine about the black man in the White House. They love being sexist as they scream about whores who want birth control from Planned Parenthood. They cheer on people who are trying to take rights away from gay couples. They hate all Muslims and Mexicans and anyone who isn’t male, white, and Christian. And they rant against “intellectuals” who want to use their “knowledge” to inform them about climate change and evolution.
They’re proud of being wrong and stupid.
But even I didn’t think there were that many of them. I was wrong.
This is why many of my conservative friends refuse to call themselves Republicans any more. Let’s just hope the Republican party destroys itself so something better can replace it.
by Guest Blogger Gail Z. Martin
I know there are good public school teachers and good principals. My kids have had some great teachers over the years, and I have friends whom I know are fantastic teachers.
Do you think the fact that this was a Muslim boy named Ahmed instead of a freckle-faced blonde kid named “Skippy” might have made a difference?
And then there are the paranoid idiots. We’ve had some of those through the years, too. My two oldest daughters, both straight-A, Advanced Placement students, were so excited that when they went to college, they no longer had to have an armed guard assigned to them in order to use the bathroom.
Yeah. We call it ‘partner peeing’. Even the guards seemed to be embarrassed about it, but it was school policy because…..bathrooms.
As a parent, you have to protect your kids by anticipating how idiots think. I warned my kids not to turn in any creative writing assignments that might be interpreted as violent or depressed because there’d be a teacher out there speed-dialing DSS unable to believe someone could have imagined something not real (see definition of ‘imagined’). My son wanted to wear his trench coat one day when it rained and he had to wear a suit for a presentation. I didn’t let him because I didn’t want to run into some teacher who thinks trench coats are evil (google ‘trench coat mafia’ if you don’t remember). Ditto doodling. When I was in high school, the boys used to doodle all kinds of weapons, explosives, and …ahem…anatomically correct elements on the covers of their notebooks. Now that would be a fast-track to the front office, with a paddywagon waiting.
One year, the school district banned the wearing of plain white t-shirts because….gangs. (Apparently gangs with absolutely no fashion sense.) Last year they sent home threatening letters promising to suspend any kid who didn’t wear his/her school photo ID to school (and then didn’t actually issue the photo IDs for two months, and dropped the whole thing by January). There’s plenty of crazy to go around.
The White House response
So here we have it, a smart kid who will probably end up founding the next Apple or Microsoft or inventing a break-through artificial organ or building some kind of amazing new technology, not only arrested for building a clock, but facing a police chief who made this statement: “Chief Larry Boyd said that the teen should have been ‘forthcoming’ by going beyond the description that what he made was a clock.” (CNN). HOW, exactly, can you be forthcoming about saying a clock is a clock? Perhaps a thesaurus listing of synonyms?
We need not only more money to hire better teachers and retain good teachers, but also a shift in our culture to value smart people instead of seeing them as someone to be mocked or frightened of.
I hope this kid and his parents sue the school and the cops and win a big enough settlement to send him to the best engineering schools in the country. And they’d better get that ‘arrest’ expunged from his record while they’re at it.
Gail Z. Martin is a novelist who writes thrilling fantasy and science fiction adventures. Her latest novel is the steampunk adventure “Iron Blood.” Read my recent interview with her here!
by guest blogger Steve Vaughan
President Obama hit Republican upside the head with the unAmerican stick yesterday.
They certainly deserved it.
“This whole anti-immigrant sentiment that’s out there in our politics right now is contrary to who we are. Because unless you are a Native American, your family came from someplace else,” Obama said. “Don’t pretend that somehow 100 years ago the immigration process was all smooth and strict. That’s not how it worked.” The grandparents and great-grandparents of politicians taking a hard line on immigration, he said, were also “somehow considered unworthy or uneducated or unwashed.”
“When I hear folks talking as if somehow these kids are different from my kids or less worthy in the eyes of God, that somehow they are less worthy of our respect and consideration and care, I think that’s un-American,” Obama said.
He’s right.
Nativism is unAmerican.
There have always been nativist fringers…but that’s what they are, the fringe.
Before Hispanics and Asians, their targets were the Irish, the Italians, the Jews.
Nativism is a sucker bet in American politics. You could ask Patrick Buchanan.
The forces of reaction always lose here, because this is a country founded not on common blood lines or common cultural ties but on a shared commitment to an optimistic vision of the future that sees more freedom for more people as the inevitable path forward.
The party of pessimism doesn’t win in the U.S.
When I heard Donald Trump arguing to “Make America Great Again,” my first thought is “America is already great.” And it’s greater now than it was 10 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago. Because the American Dream is within reach of more people.
We’re not perfect. We haven’t achieved “justice for all.” But the strength of America, the real exceptionalism of America is that we keep trying and getting closer. They say that “the arc of history bends towards justice.” That’s truer here than it anywhere else, despite those who want go back rather than forward and would like to strip America of everything that makes it exceptional in the name of nativism.
Steve Vaughan is a reporter and writer residing in Richmond, Virginia. He holds a degree in Political Science from VCU and a masters in Wise Ass from the School of Life.
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