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A part of the uniform, or a sign of a sick society?

The World Series is special. That awesome Game 5, with the vast pendulum swings of lead changes. And Game 7, with starting pitchers thrown into relief roles as if there’s no tomorrow, which there isn’t. We even had one of the victorious Houston Astros ending his post-series television interview by asking his girlfriend to marry him.

And at the opening ceremony of the final game, we were presented with a beautiful rendition of the National Anthem by four members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Except why were those officers wearing sidearms? And I tweeted out that question. Then, on with the game.

And this morning, I’m thinking I’m bothered by more than just the hypocrisy of armed police officers creating beautiful music. It’s a piece of a much-larger picture.

If I were in the position of needing a gun for self defense, I’m sure I’d be happy to have it. But few difficult questions have just one answer. There are usually 30,000 gun deaths in the United States each year. Very few of those victims were criminals shot while committing a home invasion. Most committed suicide, were killed in an accident or were murdered, either by a stranger or, more likely, someone they knew.

Thirty-thousand deaths is an epidemic.

Guns are not only tools for killing people, they are political tools. Politicians use fear to move forward their agendas. We have one such politician/carnival barker in the White House right now. We’re being encouraged to fear anyone who is not a white Christian American. Left unsaid: Trust only straight, rich men. That’s also a part of their equation. Everyone else is either a potential terrorist or someone who wants a free ride on your tax dollars. And the answer is point a gun at them, or build a wall.

It’s a fact that, in this country, most victims of terror attacks were killed by a socially disconnected white American male with a pile of automatic rifles on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel (58 dead), or who invaded a Connecticut elementary school (26 dead), or brought a gun to Bible study in a Charleston church (nine dead) or parked a truck rigged as a fertilizer bomb in front of an Oklahoma City federal building (168 dead).

Any threat, be it terrorism or the faulty maintenance of amusement-park rides, should be taken seriously. But fear is used to cloud perspective. One of seven Americans will die of heart disease. It’s the same numbers for cancer. Those numbers are of no concern to Congress or the president  as they work to disembowel the Affordable Care Act.

Nor do our leaders react to a list being compiled by The Washington Post, which says 813 citizens have been killed this year by police. Killedbypolice.net places the number at 994. The National Safety Council, The National Center For Health Statistics and the Cato Institute calculate that over your lifetime you have a one in 8,359 chance of dying in an incident involving a police officer. But those odds can go up, depending on circumstances. The most-frequent victims are white males armed with a gun or some other weapon. One in four people killed are mentally ill. Black males represent one-fourth of the people killed each year.

Of that average of 1,000 people killed each year in recent years by police, how many were unarmed? The Washington Post says it was about one in 10 in 2015. That percentage has dropped slightly each of the last two years. So we’re getting better? It depends on your reaction to one of those videos where it appears clear that a pissed-off cop executed an unarmed black man.

Numbers are easy to dismiss. Those same charts also reveal that over our lifetime, we have a one in 1,600,000 chance of dying from an asteroid hitting the Earth. I’ve never even heard of anyone being killed by a space rock. That number is simply an actuarial calculation based on the knowledge that humongous meteors are out there and the planet has been struck in the past. And if one the size that wiped out the dinosaurs hits us again, civilization is done.

Unlike meteor strikes, we see terrorist attacks frequently. Yet the Cato Institute calculates your chance of dying at the hands of a foreign-born terrorist as one in 3.6 million, and that includes the 3,000 people who died in 9/11.

So a story’s not told simply in numbers. In the just-completed World Series, was the excellence of the games, and the home-run record, a matter of great hitting or lousy pitching? It’s your perspective. We cheer when Air Force fighter jets fly low over a sports stadium. If you’re a shepherd in Afghanistan and you see a low-flying jet, you run. At a football game, people stand for the National Anthem. But when athletes kneel in protest of police violence against black people, outrage follows. Both are political messages. But one is allowed, one frowned upon.

One respondent to my pre-game tweet about the LA police quartet insisted guns are “part of the uniform.”

No, comfortable trousers are a part of the uniform. Guns are a whole other, and very ill-fitting, accessory in civil society.

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St. Louis at Washington: Racism as the Game of the Week

The St. Louis Rams protest: "Hands up. Don't shoot."

The St. Louis Rams protest: “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”

As five of the St. Louis Rams ran onto the field for the start of the game last Sunday, they paused for a moment to raise their hands in the air. A now-familiar sign of protest from Ferguson, Mo. “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”

As we’ve all been trained to understand, there is nothing more important in the world on a Sunday than an NFL game. So it’s not surprising that complaints followed. I expect that from the intractable folks who see nothing wrong with the team from Washington embracing a blatantly racist nickname. Or the hardcore fans who seem disinterested in the NFL’s obvious complicity in enabling its players to beat up women. Nothing should interrupt the sanctity of the game, as young men prepare to deliver concussions to each other that will, in a few years’ time, leave many of them unable to remember where they’d parked their cars.

But I don’t welcome the protests about the protests that came from public officials. The authorities who represent the people.

We have a serious race issue in this country. And a lot of people think the best answer is to walk away from the story of a white cop shooting an unarmed 18-year-old black man and now isn’t going to stand trial for his actions. a lot of people think we should walk away from the cause of the riots that surrounded the event. Just like we walked away from the 26 dead women and children at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Because these problems take care of themselves, right?

Cops aren’t the problem. They have a tough job, we all know it. The problem is the institutions that police our citizens. Institutions that are increasingly equipped to wage war on citizens. We’ve been seeing it for years. Police using tear gas on citizens, police beating up citizens, police arresting citizens. Citizens who are doing nothing more than utilizing their American right to protest. The individual cops didn’t make the decision to fire tear gas into a crowd. They were told to do so.

No one was going to fire a round of tear gas at the five St. Louis Rams with their hands in the air. This was a deeply important game between two teams with losing records. But the next morning, the St. Louis Police Officers Association demanded that the five Rams be disciplined, and that the team and the NFL should issue a public apology.

According to the SLPOA, “now that the evidence is in and Officer Wilson’s account has been verified by physical and ballistic evidence as well as eye-witness testimony, which led the grand jury to conclude that no probable cause existed that Wilson engaged in any wrongdoing, it is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over-and-over again.”

Well, a whole lot of citizens are not buying the narrative put forth by the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office that allowed the cop who did the killing to get away without a trial. And it’s not just the hoodlums setting fires, but lawyers and experts in the law who have expressed that opinion.

Hence, the protests.

The Rams and the NFL – for once, after a long string of public-relations failures – are doing the right thing by not disciplining the players. It’s called free speech, the first Amendment in the Constitution that our law enforcement agencies are hired to defend.

The authorities are never holier than thou. We’ve seen that too many times. The actions of the people who represent us, and defend our laws, should be under constant scrutiny. The attitude I’ve heard raised repeatedly by law enforcement after the Ferguson killing – and let’s not forget that we’ve witnessed a string of unarmed black men killed by police – is, “You’re either with us or against us.”

No questions asked. That’s a little too arrogant for today’s atmosphere of distrust. The police are not supposed to be a separate class of citizens with separate rights. They’re supposed to be one of us.

It seems they need a reminder. Perhaps this Sunday. I see that the Rams are playing that team from Washington with the blatantly racist nickname. FedExField would make a fine public forum for a discussion on race. We could start it with all of Rams running out onto the field and raising their hands. Then all of the players from Washington, that team with the blatantly racist nickname, could run out onto the field and raise their hands. Then everyone in the stadium could stand and raise their hands.

Now that would be the NFL Game of the Week.

The biggest threat: Richard Sherman or Chris Christie?

A trio of fine local singer-songwriters – Steve Piper, Connie Deming and Scott Regan – were playing Sunday night, so I missed Sunday’s NFL playoff games. By my calculation, this is the 12th straight month that pro football has gone on without me, but I’ve been really busy. Visiting mom, picking up dog poop in the back yard, crafting a used-tire sculpture.

But Monday morning, I had to race to the computer to watch video of the NFL playoff moment that everyone was talking about. A post-game interview with a cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks. As a former sportswriter, let me tell you, that’s the interview I always wanted to get. Erin Andrews, after they hand you whatever the sideline sports-reporter version of the Pulitzer is, next season Fox Sports is gonna put you behind one of those shiny glass studio desks. That seat way over on the far end, next to Tony Siragusa, the guy who sells man diapers.

Richard Sherman had just made a game-saving play against San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Michael Crabtree when Andrews pulled him aside.

“Well, I’m the best corner in the game!” Sherman shouted. “When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you’re going to get! Don’t you ever talk about me! Crabtree! Don’t you open your mouth about the best! Or I’m going to shut it for you real quick! LOB!”
And that was it. Andrews nervously handed the show back to the guys in the studio. The producers must have suspected they had a crazy man on their hands. No telling what Sherman might say next to innocent Americans.

You’ll note that Sherman was looking right into the camera for much of the interview, just like they do in pro wrestling. And, despite still being amped up after making the biggest play in the biggest game of his pro career, Sherman did not drop an f-bomb. “LOB” is a reference to “Legion of Boom.” In the marketing-savvy world of professional sports, everyone strives for an identity, and the Seattle defensive backs have adopted one straight out of the comic books.

Sherman gave the entertainment-driven pro sports world exactly what it is selling. Immediately, sports commentators who moan about the boring interviews that they get from most athletes attacked Sherman for his lack of what they define as sportsmanship in an astonishingly violent sport.  The Internet exploded with racist comments. Conservative cable pundits were shocked that a black man was shouting to be heard over the roar of a home crowd that’s celebrated for making noise.

Here are a couple of more details about this Richard Sherman fellow. He graduated second in his high school class, is a graduate of Stanford, one of his hobbies is reading. He writes a smart blog. Here’s  what he wrote about the reaction to his interview:

To those who would call me a thug or worse because I show passion on a football field — don’t judge a person’s character by what they do between the lines. Judge a man by what he does off the field, what he does for his community, what he does for his family.

Does this episode make you think of another one of the week’s newsmakers? Chris Christie, anyone?

The governor of New Jersey is a loud and arrogant man. He is well known for yelling, using abusive language and calling people names.  He talks down to reporters and screams at school teachers. He is thoroughly unlikeable. And he is  a liar. His story defending his administration’s closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge, political retribution for some as-yet defined slight, defies logic and is full of holes. The mayor of Hoboken has accused him of holding back Superstorm Sandy recovery funds unless she backed a real-estate development project run by a Christie political pal. He’s being investigated for using Federal Sandy money to produce a pro-New Jersey TV ad that looked to most people like a political ad. Every day now, it’s something new.

There are many people out there who find Richard Sherman’s behavior intolerable. Many of the same people love Christie’s aggressive style. He’s fighting for the people of New Jersey, say his defenders. New Jersey politics is a violent sport. They see Christie a victim of, as Fox News calls it, the “wussification” of American men.

There’s a few differences, of course. Those critics immediately spotted one. I see another. Sherman’s moment lasted mere seconds, and everyone laughed. But the kind of thug behavior that Christie employs has seriously impacted the lives of thousands of Americans.

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