Editor:
I would like to discuss the issue currently happening that began with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the football field during the national anthem to protest that police – assumedly, white police – were shooting black men unfairly.
There was a heart-rending situation in which a woman called the police for help with her disoriented black male acquaintance, and they shot the man. And they wouldn’t have if they’d had total information on his mental, or physical, health condition. And there have been other cases where we only get the view that the black man was a choir-boy, but there are whispers that this wasn’t the case at all.
Two or three things, and I’ll try to be brief. I went to a college where maybe a third of the student population were black. I noticed about them at the time that they were amplified. A group would be coming up the hall and talking together, and loud. (They were often my friends.) They moved around more than “we” did when they communicated. Not all of them, but they were amplified.
They don’t know that their “way” is intimidating – it was to me. And I’m sure it’s frightening to the police.
Sometimes those policemen should be punished. We don’t like to think that some of them don’t try as hard as they should not to shoot people, of any color. Every shooting of a black man by a policeman is not unjustified.
Sadly, there are persons who are too loud and angry, too energetic – looking fully ready to be violent. There has been marching and chanting by black people and snowflake hangers on, that “we want the policemen dead, now.”
How horrible. How insane. What a blanket condemnation.
How frightening for the poIiceman. Am I right?
If the facts of these shootings could be televised and judged by the public, would that help? There’s a new court show like that on. Then people could see all the evidence, and look at the evidence fairly.
Protesting it on the football field during our nation’s song is not the right place.
Terry McNulty
Sweet Home