Tuesday, January 30, 2018

On at least one shade of gray

The FBI is wearing the white hat these days, and that hat looks a little odd to me.  This is the same organization that a few months ago was equating black lives matter spokespeople with domestic terrorists, dusting off FBI memos from the 1960's about The Black Panther Party, changing the dates, and targeting black and brown people as straight-up institutional racism.

At the same time, neighborhoods do become less stable and peaceful when these activists seize local control, there is a tunnel-vision tone-deaf argument to be made against them for preservation of public safety, but it's important to understand that there is also such a thing as a rational lie.  This is an example.

Food, medicine, clothing and shelter.  That's the recipe for peace.  Address those problems and you will have peace.  This country can afford to do that, but that's another discussion.  The problem isn't that people want conflict, they engage in conflict when they don't feel safe.

On the other hand, the only thing that has made the significant social gains we have made over the years a permanent part of life in the US is the rule of law.  The FBI is the federal instrument of the rule of law.  This is not a bad thing.  The white hat should fit.  It's a shame that it looks odd, but that's on me.  Everything has good and bad in it, myself included.

If good is white and bad is black, I am definitely an ever-shifting shade of gray.  So is the FBI, so are these issues.  The GOP wants voters to believe it's white vs. black.  They prefer that a dormant unrepentant pedophile serve in the Senate rather than a Democratic prosecutor who jailed American terrorists amongst a citizenry who held a level of hostility to their punishment.

I am dismayed that the Democratic Party is currently aspiring to do little more than be the negative inverse image of the GOP, white where they are black, black where they are white. 

There is no white or black, only gray.