Letters to the Editor
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It reminds me a bit of Tim Matheson
Standing up before Dean Wormer and saying that he's not going to stand there while Wormer insults the United States of America.
Symbolism is important to the creation of change. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the I Have a Dream speech in Detroit a few weeks before he gave it again in Washington. The first time, it didn't resonate. The second time, it became a part of everyone's (well, maybe not the schools in Jena, I don't know) American History curriculum. The legends that surrounded Rosa Parks worked, even though we now know that there was some hocum involved in her saying she wanted to sit because she was tired. If she'd said instead that as secretary of the local NAACP she had planned the protest, it might not have made international headlines.
In these times, when we can expect a knee-jerk reaction all over Fox News to anything the right doesn't like (ask Max Cleland), choosing good symbolic things to protest, and to protest sincerely, is as important as it ever was. Jena is an easy message to send because the symbolism of the nooses on the trees is not missed by many. And the school officials denying that the black students of today got the message resonates so well as well.
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so, lemme get this straight
it's ok for six kids to beat another kid badly enough that he could have been severely, permanently injured. Those six kids should have been allowed to walk away without any responsibility at all?
I'm late to this party, but is that the argument?
If it is, I'm not getting it. Nooses in the tree? Despicable. But no-one was lying on the ground bleeding.
You're telling me it's ok for kids to respond to severe provocation that is, nonetheless, entirely symbolic and not physical, by beating the crap out of someone?
I've had trouble with this thing from the start, and I still do. No-one has adequately explained why it's ok for that white kid to have been badly beaten, when, apparently, none of the six kids who beat him had been physically attacked. Am I wrong on this?
Someone educate me on the *facts* of the case, if I am.
When we start condoning violence in response to an insult, or threat, no matter how severe, we're just as bad as those who threaten. This is what laws are for.
From what I've seen and heard, black people supporting the Jena Six are in favor of violence. Does that mean I can shoot someone who threatens me? They haven't touched me, mind you, just threatened me. I can shoot them and walk away?
Because that seems like what's being argued here. It's just a tad too close to the OJ thing to be anything like reasonable. OJ slaughtered two people, we all knew it, but he walked because black people on the jury thought that was ok. A little generalized revenge, right? I saw it, heard it, from black people in my own life, and there was nothing pretty about it. It was despicable.
So, it was ok for those kids to beat that white kid because he threatened them, but never touched them, right? Doesn't seem right from here. That way lies a war of all against all.
As for the rest...racism is the savage problem it's always been, but these days a lousy education in America is probably dictated more by class, than race. If you have money, you can get most anything you want. If you don't, you can't.
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Two wrongs don't make it right
It seems that all the publicity I’ve seen surrounding the Jena 6 is a bunch of hand-wringing about how put upon the 6 people who jumped 1 person are for having charges brought against them for it. Pardon my being contrarian here, but barring some very specific extenuating circumstance- like the white guy taunting the 6 blacks in question and them immediately responding to it- this sounds like just another cowardly racist hate crime, and the Jena 6 should be convicted of battery.
My experience with this sort of thing is personal. I’m a white man who grew up in a black neighborhood and I saw this kind of thing all too frequently. Many of the blacks in my high school were consistently belligerent, and I heard “white honkey motherfucker” more times in my K-12 career than most of you reading this and writing me off as a bigot can possibly imagine. In junior high and high school it was understood that if a white guy got into any kind of scrape with any black guy (even if they were best friends) it was always regarded as about race by blacks, and the white guy would be mobbed, kicked and beaten for it. This happened to one of my brothers within a few feet of me- and with no provocation beyond the mere fact that he was… well, a white honkey motherfucker like me at the wrong place at the wrong time. The only reason I escaped the same thing was because I stayed on my feet, had a wall against my back and a long reach. I left high school and my home town feeling very hateful towards blacks, and it took me both years and distance to get over it.
None of this is to excuse any of the circumstances leading up to this incident, or to avoid responsibility for at least attempting to deal with the larger issues it brings into the public discourse. But two wrongs do not make a right. Contrary to what all the political correctoids out there might believe, racism is a very personal matter, and is as endemic to blacks as it is to whites. Society should take a zero tolerance view of both it and the hate crimes perpetrated in its name. The redneck(s) who put the nooses in the tree should be found and prosecuted for hate crimes. But just because they did something stupid, hurtful and hateful does not excuse the Jena 6- much less make them heroes and martyrs.
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You don't have it straight
If you want to be educated about the facts look them up yourself rather than try and use your deliberate ignorance of them to further your own silly agenda. Who said anything about the last incident being "ok" and the nonsensical and your unrelated OJ comparison, along with the dubious interpretation of the jury's decision in the OJ criminal case, is almost too absurd for words.