“You gotta be cruel to be kind, in the right measure.” A commenter perfectly captured the essence of the idea:
The term was invented by Shakespeare in his tragedy Hamlet. To be ‘cruel to be kind’ is to cause someone pain for his or her own good. Telling someone something that will hurt them because it’s better for them in the long run. It appears like you’re trying to hurt them when in fact, you’re looking out for their best interest.
Race relations do not exist in a vacuum any more than mass shootings or anything else. The mental health of America is central to the story of all that surrounds us.
What I have illustrated throughout this site and my documentary — is not the mark of a healthy nation:
It’s the mentality of a mob
If an entire nation of “normal” people refuse to work together to solve problems — and delight in rapid-fire ridicule against any challenge to their beliefs (baseless or otherwise):
How do you think that impacts those who are already inclined to mow people down?
Speaking of shootings — you wanna put trigger-happy cops in prison (and rightly so when warranted).
I’m interested in how they became trigger-happy.
That behavior often factors into it does not necessarily mean that race wasn’t involved as well. But you don’t allow for anything outside of what you instantly perceive.
If race is part of the story, you make it the entire story.
Keyboard commandos are on edge across the country.
So what makes you think that people who live their lives in danger every day — aren’t overreacting partly as a reflection of a country that overreacts on everything?
My aim is not to absolve the police, it’s to paint the possibility that race may not be as much of a factor as you think it is.
The gentleman who inspired me to read that MLK book — took issue with my suggestion on “shared responsibility” in Part 3. He objected with clear-cut incidents like Philando Castile.
That example is not in dispute.
That behavior was not a problem in that instance — is not a valid argument for the times when it was. Once again, to argue in good faith, you must answer within the confines of the question.
“Good faith” is a gray area — but only for a grace period.
You may have honest intentions in an intellectually dishonest argument. But you can’t forever ignore facts and still be operating in good faith.
And it’s an irrefutable fact that the behavior that Chris Rock hilariously highlights is part of the problem.
You don’t wanna acknowledge it for the same reason Tamara Holder disingenuously replied, “It may or may not” to the profile question.
She didn’t want to give any ground — and neither do you. You think you’re serving your cause that way.
You’re not — it’s the opposite
It’s pure fantasy to think that you can ignore key dimensions of a problem and solve it with slogans, monuments, and movements.
This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it.
As if I hadn’t even mentioned “shared responsibility” moments ago — someone’s bound to seize on that statement as if I’m saying blacks are entirely to blame.
Topping the list of Mentality of a Mob: “Rather than read and digest, people scan and dismiss — frantically seeking any fragment they can frame in their favor.”
In Cruel To Be Kind, I float an idea to solve the homeless problem. It would work — but you know why we’ll never do it?
Because it’s ugly
In their summary of the opinion, the judges wrote, “As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”
That last line is what this fundamental divide is all about.
Criminalizing the homeless solves nothing, but the notion that they don’t have a choice is preposterous. When you provide avenues of hopelessness, you have taken away that fundamental responsibility that we all have in making hard choices.
That “false premise” philosophy is miserably failing.
But rather than take hard look at the situation in a serious-minded manner, the same people who helped create the problem, would rather be delicate and perpetuate it.
“I’m not going to let somebody run me out of somewhere where I’ve made my home,” said a camper in San Francisco. I feel for anyone in her shoes, but there’s a line between empathy and enabling.
During the Great Depression, people went to wherever the work was.
The modern-day down-and-out of are incapable of doing what others did 90 years ago?
I fail to understand why it’s the responsibility of the state to accommodate people who can’t afford to live there.
To whatever degree I’ve simplified the issues to capture the fundamentals — it’s nowhere near what America does to overcomplicate them.
The Right wallows in absurdity more often than not — but they’re the ones making sense on this front. And when people consistently fail to make sense on an issue, ulterior motives are invariably involved.
It’s the same fallacy on race relations — as those most invested in improving them, are not honest about the realities that plague the problems.
Loury was right on the money on this — as you are trying to solve old problems in old ways:
I claimed that the problems of the lower classes of African American society plagued by poverty and joblessness were, at the end of the day, not remediable by the means which had been so effective in the 1960s of protest and petitioning for fair treatment.
Back in the day at Purdue, you’d see sweatshirts everywhere with “Go Ugly Early” on them. The catchphrase came to mind as a concept for going to the guts of a problem from the get-go.
1619 is about as far away from that as imaginable.
Simply going back to the beginning of a problem — does not necessarily mean it’s the root of it now.
But you’d rather dance around problems for decades than offend anyone in the process of trying to help them.
Montaigne’s message is more eloquent than Go Ugly Early, (and I was just having fun with the memory anyway) — but it’s the same principle of being clear-sighted in how you seek to solve a problem:
If you don’t want to get shot . . . just do what I tell you. . . . Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
But no, you wanna debate that too
Even a multi-millionaire like Don Lemon’s got a chip on his shoulder.
I am one who always says that should comply with police officers — especially as a man of color. When I’m stopped by a police officer: “Officer, why are you stopping me?” Yes, officer or whatever. Now, I’m an American — I shouldn’t have to do that. I shouldn’t have to be “Yes, sir” to anybody. I’m a grown, ‘you know what’ man.” But I do it because I want to stay alive. That’s why I do it. I shouldn’t have to.
How about just doing it out of courtesy and respect?
How hard is it to just put yourself in their shoes — and consider the crap that cops deal with day in and day out?
Yeah, they signed up for it — but you can do your part to make the situation go as smoothly as possible.
And Don — they blew right by your bit about complying and seized on “I shouldn’t have to.”
Nice work
All that aside, I’m glad that guy brought up Castile, as it reminded me of what I wrote in 2017:
My view of police officers these days: They’re overly protective of their own safety — in a job that by definition, comes with a certain degree of danger.
If you’re unwilling to take that extra split-second to ascertain the threat, then you have no business being in that job.
That aside, we all have a responsibility when dealing with the police. If you cop an attitude (especially in today’s climate) — you are radically increasing your chances of getting gunned down).
Yes, you can find examples where blacks did everything right and got killed anyway. But that number pales in comparison to the times where they didn’t follow instructions.
In many cases, they didn’t deserve to be shot, but they played a role in what happened. Properly following instructions would have most likely produced a different outcome.
This officer in Castile’s case was clearly out of control. Even if Philando didn’t do something exactly as the officer expected — the slightest misunderstanding is not grounds for shooting someone (not to mention the absurd number of shots).
The mere perception of a threat is not enough — and it’s all the more outrageous when the guy acknowledged he had a weapon. This person’s comment nailed it:
If someone is trying to get the drop on you, I don’t think they would calmly say “I just want to let you know that I have a gun”
Yanez stated that his justification for the shooting was based on fear for his own life because he believed that Castile’s behavior was abusive toward a young girl passenger (Reynolds’ daughter) in the car.[43] Yanez said: “I thought, I was gonna die, and I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what, what care does he give about me?”[43]
ThThat’s an awful lot of analysis for something that happened so fast. His argument is absolutely ridiculous and sounds entirely concocted.
I don’t buy it for a second.
You cannot make sweeping assumptions like that in ascertaining a threat. And it’s absurd that an officer would fear for his life over the perception of a person’s character regarding secondhand smoke.
Grade-A horseshit
I’d rather go to prison than come up with such a stupid excuse.
Speaking of excuses.
This notion that compliance and respectability can save someone’s life in an encounter with police is not the reality for black men in this country
— Charles Coleman, Jr.
“Compliance and respectability” worked out well for this guy:
“Well, you can’t take that example in isolation.”
You’re right — so why are you doing it?
What if Kaepernick kneeled and acknowledged that they need to do their part while asking the police to do theirs?
— Richard W. Memmer (Part 3)
That would be the catalyst for a real conversation — the recognition that there’s plenty of blame to go around.
When you act like the one on the right, you’re not only endangering yourself — you’re helping to create the atmosphere of confrontation for others by putting the police on edge.
The attitude on the left would do no such thing. Charles Coleman, Jr. is flat-out wrong, as the importance of attitude cannot be overstated.
There are “Bush haters” and “Trump haters,” so the Right conveniently labels all scrutiny as such. And once again, dismissing an argument on hate alone is not valid.
It’s not that motive doesn’t matter — it’s that merit matters more.
And I made it abundantly clear in Part 6 — that factoring for motive is crucial:
Party-line conditioning is designed to cherry-pick whatever allows your beliefs to persist within your solidified perception.
How the Left handles the homeless is exactly in line with their kid-gloves approach to race relations. And if anyone challenges you:
As I wrote on Cruel To Be Kind:
A few years ago, a founder of a tech startup posted a letter about the homeless in San Francisco — and the guy got hammered on social media for his “whiny lack of sensitivity.”
Over-the-top sensitivity is part of the problem.
It’s not cold and heartless to think that places of business should not have to put up with people running down the value of their investment.
If that doesn’t register, why don’t you invite the homeless to make camp at the end of your driveway? As stalwarts of sensitivity, I’m sure your plummeting property value won’t affect your outlook in the least.
The homeless and their advocates say they need more services and homes for the unhoused.
More money + more services = more homeless
That formula doesn’t make sense to me.
Perhaps another approach is in order?
What? This is America . . .
We don’t change course when our convictions don’t come true, we double down.
And all the while, you miserably fail to understand how your misguided methods fuel a narrative that poisons everything you pursue.
Even the simplest example of modern-day talk shows illustrates how people completely miss the boat on correlating events with the times.
Whenever you see a clip of an interview reflecting a time long gone, out comes the commentary about the “good ol’ days.”
And right on cue, the complaining about the “mainstream media” (racking up Likes in unison of your insightful observations on how far we have fallen)
Never mind that you’re part of the circus you’re bitching about.
You act like these things exist in a vacuum — just as the Left does on race-related matters. It’s undeniable that the Democratic Party manipulates racially charged incidents for political gain.
Once you acknowledge that — you have to be willing to ask, “How much of what I see was manufactured for my benefit?”
“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” — a quote that’s been around in various forms for over 300 years (evidently the original being from 1710):
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
Calm, comradely discussion — allowing nuanced ideas the time/space to really be expounded and developed.
Sounds great
Lemme know when you’re ready to do that. Biggest and most costly lie in modern history sounds like a good place to start.
But no, you opt to be play these cockamamie games instead — marching in full-battle regalia in the “facts over feelings” parade.
And for the woke with their endless bending over backwards so as not to offend:
Wake up — and get some guts
I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
It seems like only yesterday
I didn’t have a clue
I stood alone not knowing where to turn
Now suddenly I look around
And everything looks new . . .They call it understanding
A willingness to grow
I’m finally understanding
There’s so much I could knowUntil the day you came along
I used to just get lost
I only heard the things I wanted to hear
It always seemed like no cared
Then you took the time
And now I look and everything seems clear . . .
One Voice Became Two 