NOVEMBER 17, 2021 – I’d wanted to write something cool (but heartwarming), when Bam!—I read about the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois kid who grabbed his assault rifle and ammo and drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin to kill a couple of BLM protesters . . . in self-defense. After closing arguments in a courtroom presided over by a judge whose ring-tone is You-Know-Who’s well-known rally song, said kid picked—by raffle method!—the jurors who’ll decide his fate.
Only in America would such a bad movie plot become confused with reality; strike “confused with.” The entire krazy kase reminds me of the “errors” page of Highlights magazine wherein you tried to find all the “mistakes” while you waited your turn at the dentist’s office. Or worse, “Rittenhouse” is a comic book in which “justice” is contorted into supreme injustice in some underdeveloped country two oceans and three continents away from the good ol‘ USA. Or worse yet, “Rittenhouse” is a TV western in which a punk vigilante is apprehended in front of the town saloon, then tried inside by his uncle-as-justice-with-“a-piece”-and-a-wink-and-a-nod presiding.
How the civilized world must gasp at American “democracy in action”!
But what about us? Where do we stand? Or will we remain seated, allowing hardly a sigh as we scroll through our newsfeeds?
Mind you, I fully subscribe to “innocent until proven guilty.” The problem with this badge of democratic idealism, however, is that if it’s applied to a fault against poster children of official injustice—the likes of Derek Chauvin and kid-Kyle wielding and shooting an assault rifle—“innocent until proven guilty” is an empty right when assigned to dead victims and grieving loved ones.
I’m incensed—still, again—by the worst pandemic of all: our culture’s obsession with “the right to bear arms” and our hair-trigger use of them. I’m ashamed that four centuries after the introduction of slavery to the continent, 156 years after the Civil War, 151 years after ratification of the Civil War Amendments, 144 years after the death knell of Reconstruction, and 57/56 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act/Voting Rights Act, we’re still a racist nation, revealed most damningly by the indignation of white denialism of that trait, not to mention white vigilantism in reaction to BLM demonstrations.
In the lofty echo of juridical principles—“due process” and “innocent until proven guilty”—and within our time-honored political architecture of “states’ rights,” we perpetuate this country’s racial divide. Whether by cynical distortion or ignorant acquiescence, the outcome is the same.
If gun control is as much a lost cause in America as is Covid control, then at the very least we should drop “Project 1619,” “Critical Race Theory,” and whatever other nomenclature offends white people and require our citizens to read honest treatments of race in every chapter of American history and every corner of our culture; not simply scroll past images of “accomplished blacks,” like Booker T. Washington (whose surname wasn’t West African) and Leontyne Price (who sang Mozart, not the music of Mayumba) during “Black History Month.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
