By DARLENE VANN / Headline Surfer Blog: Musings
EDGEWATER, Fla. - My soul is deeply distressed by the George Floyd murder.
Make no mistake that this is exactly what it was - cold-blooded murder.
Watching the footage from videos shot by bystanders made me sick to my stomach! I kept wondering why the officer standing there talking to an officer, identified as Derek Chauvin, with his knee on the neck of a man gasping for breath and begging for air did nothing. Or why two other officers also holding Mr. Floyd down did not stop it.
Finally someone in law enforcement saw the current injustice and the offending officer, Chauvin, has been charged with second-degree murder (upgraded from third-degree murder initially) and ordered held on $1.25 million bail.
The other three cops -- Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng, who helped restrain Floyd, and Tou Thao, who stood near the others -- have been charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.
No matter what George Floyd was alleged to have done (accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes), - no person should die so horribly at the knee of someone who whose job it is to protect people. This racial divide has gone on way too long.
No matter what George Floyd was alleged to have done (accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes), - no person should die so horribly at the knee of someone who whose job it is to protect people. This racial divide has gone on way too long.
Those persons kidnapped from their home countries in the beginning did not ask to become slaves. Who made them that way? White people who so elevated themselves above all others in their own minds, that’s who. No one in their right mind should ever have thought people could be bought and sold, abused and torn from their families time after time. One would think after hundreds of years it would by now be clear that skin color does not make a man good or bad.
If you lived through more recent times you can see peaceful protests and just who started throwing tear gas, beating them with their clubs, turning water hoses on those protesters? White policemen, that’s who. When they started that it sparked such anger that riots and looting were the retaliation. No, looting and burning cars and all that foolishness should not have happened but the anger was deep seated from long ago.
Why should Rosa Parks have had to sit in the back of the bus? Why could blacks not be allowed to sit at lunch counters? Will we never learn? Sadly things calm down and life marches on and people forget. Police need different training and psychological testing before being given a gun and a badge.
The vast majority of our police are good people who abhor the few who carry their hatreds to their jobs. It is time the good guys stop turning their heads away and start doing something to get them off the job.
No loyalty code of blue brothers should protect a dangerous bigot. There needs to be a database of these people so that they cannot just move to another city and join another police force. It is long past time that we finally love one another and stop fighting. Time we not only learn but also remember the lesson.
