Freddie Gray and Walter Scott

It’s wrong to run from the police. BUT, running from the police isn’t a capital crime!

Walter Scott’s only apparent “crime” was being behind in child support. Scott ran to avoid being jailed for not being able to provide for his kids and was shot in the back for it. The ONLY person responsible for how that ended was the shit stain who shot him and tried to cover up the murder. Seriously, FUCK THAT COP! I hope he does the right thing and kills himself immediately – the less that community spends on his confinement and trial, the more they can pay Walter Scott’s family in a HUGE settlement. No matter how much money the family ends up getting, it won’t be enough because it will NEVER replace their dad.

Freddie Gray proved that running from the police is NOT the irrefutable evidence of guilt. If you encounter the police and haven’t done anything – as in Gray’s case – the police should let you be on your way IF they catch you…not stuff you in the back of a police van. If you’re injured in the process, you’re entitled to medical care. ALL SIX of the cops indicted in his case need to fucking kill themselves too. If they don’t, I hope they’re ALL convicted.

I won’t pretend to understand what compelled Gray – who clearly hadn’t done anything to get arrested for – to run. Even the knife he had on him (though originally described as a switchblade) was legal to carry in Baltimore. I still believe to my core that running from the police is wrong. This belief stems from deeply ingrained lessons taught by my parents and a life-time of personal experience as a white female American. Every interaction I’ve ever had with Law Enforcement was non-confrontational. Even when I was acting an ass in public (in the absence of my mom and her wooden spoon) as soon as the cops showed up, I straightened the fuck up until they left. I won’t pretend to know what goes thru the mind of an African American male born and raised in an erroneously labeled “Post-Racial” American era. Whether you agree with me or not (and I really don’t care if you don’t) we can all agree running from the cops should NEVER be punishable by death.  Anyone who believes running from the cops should equal a death sentence is a willfully ignorant bigot who just needs to shut the fuck up and listen for a while.

I hate the term “Post-Racial” America…mostly because I ignorantly bought into that bull shit for way too long. It took the death of Trayvon Martin to open my eyes to what’s really going on in my country. Don’t get me wrong. I still LOVE my country. I swore an oath to defend it from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I still feel strongly about that. If I were still physically able, I’d still be serving what I believe to be the GREATEST NATION ON EARTH. I’m not just still willing to die for my country; I’m still willing to kill for it. That attitude doesn’t mean I don’t see our flaws. We’ve come a long way in the last 239 years. But, now I see that we have a lot farther to go. We can start by being honest about the perception and treatment of African Americans and other minorities in this country. What began in Sanford, Cleveland, Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore will not end until we recognize the flaws in our perceptions and in our policies – both written and unwritten – in reference to the African American community.

One of the many egregious examples of what I’m talking about is Otis Byrd. When Americans thought he was lynched in Mississippi, one of the first kernels of information widely published (because fuck us for not saying anything when we know NOTHING of substance to say) was his completely irrelevant 35 year old arrest record. What have u heard since his death was determined a suicide? Nothing…nada…zip. Where’s the in-depth commentary about the source of his angst? If someone like Robin Williams had hanged himself, the media would have crawled up his ass with a microscope to understand why he killed himself…oh, wait…

The fucking media pulled the same shit on Freddie Gray. I read his arrest record. NOTHING in it justifies what happened to him. There was not a single Capitol Crime listed…and yet, he’s dead….and people are talking about how many times he was arrested…before he was unlawfully detained and negligently (with a depraved heart) killed.

My final observation on this issue is this picture:

Send in the Moms

I’ve seen this picture and the video it was taken from circulated on social media ever since this obviously distraught mom saw her son putting himself in a potentially dangerous situation. Her maternal instinct took over and the boy got tuned up in public and dragged home. Some have claimed that sharing it is racist. Let me disabuse everyone of that notion right now.

Corporal Punishment in raising kids is not confined to the African American community. My Irish/Hungarian mom carried a wooden spoon in her purse and NEVER hesitated to use it in public when one of her kids acted an ass. So the assessment is simple. If you look at this picture and see a distraught mom making a correction on a kid headed down a potentially dangerous path, think about the series of events that put that mother and son in that position that day.

If you look at the Baltimore picture and all you see is the stereotypical “Angry Black Woman,” you’re the one with a problem. You’re a bigot. Think about what led you to that perception and work to change it.

I HAVE to believe that the bigotry, the over policing of minorities and police brutality will change. I HAVE to believe that. If I didn’t have that hope, everything I believe about my country would be a lie.

Reflecting this Memorial Day

As Memorial Day approaches, it has been almost a full month since the news broke about Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of the United States Military. As a soldier, I couldn’t be more proud of the stunning demonstration of American Military prowess displayed in the killing of one of the most hated men in the world. We could have very easily used a Predator Drone and a few well placed Hellfire Missiles to eradicate that particular menace to Islam, faithful Muslims and the rest of the world. Instead, our best and brightest went in with surgical precision and greatly reduced possible collateral damage and accomplished their mission. They did it without losing a single warrior. It is that commitment and focus that makes the United States Military the best in the world.

I proudly wore the United States Army uniform for 7 years as I trained for and completed my deployment to Afghanistan. Our official mission was Force Protection. My personal mission was to make sure every soldier who got on the plane with me when we lifted for Afghanistan, got back on a plane alive and came home to their families and loved ones when it was over. In all honesty the Hearts and Minds of the Afghani people were a secondary consideration. I can’t speak for my Battle Buddies but in my opinion, as long as illiteracy plagues an uneducated general population, rampant corruption thrives in the Afghan Government, Military and Police and there are Billions of dollars to be made by Private Contractors that lofty goal remains pitifully unrealistic. So, the protection and security of my Battle Buddies was my primary focus every time I left the wire. We had some very close calls and several injuries but, fortunately everyone who left the wire with me made it back and everyone who deployed with me made it home.

This Memorial Day will be my first since I came home. I can’t help but reflect on the recent death of bin Laden and what it means. Since his death, the United States Congress tried to step-up the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and there has been conflicting reporting that the State Department had opened negotiations with Mohammed Omar, a Taliban leader and the man sworn to protect bin Laden. Are these examples of progress? I don’t know. Fewer troops in Afghanistan certainly represent fewer American targets for Insurgents. But does it mean more security for the Afghan people? Or, does it mean the Taliban will take over again? Again, I don’t know.

Here’s what I do know – in terms of the United States of America vs Osama bin Laden, the score is roughly:
bin Laden      9,000
U.S.A.             1
Perhaps I’ve over-thought it but it seems to me, we indeed won the final battle against bin Laden personally when he met SEAL Team 6, but we lost the “war” against him on September 11th, 2001.

Prior to 9/11 bin Laden’s goals were clear: Bankrupt America & Kill Americans. We lost the minute George W. Bush got suckered into putting American Service Members in bin Laden’s back yard. He played right into the terrorist’s hands. The former president further “screwed the pooch” when he failed to reinforce that Mission in Afghanistan. He didn’t have reinforcements to send to Afghanistan because he was to sending them to Iraq. He let Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – the two most morally bankrupt American leaders to disgrace the White House in modern era – distract him with another war. Because of it, we lost bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001. There was no al Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. Bush’s incompetent leadership facilitated bin Laden’s escape at Tora Bora and guaranteed targets for al Qaeda (Bush practically put us right in their laps) for another 9 years at great financial, emotional and physical cost to our Country. After almost 10 years of war and one bad decision after another by Bush and his administration, our economy is STILL circling the drain.
   3,000 Americans Killed on 9/11
+ 6,006 American Service Members between Iraq and Afghanistan (as of 2011 May 25^th)
= 9,006 to 1 (bin Laden)

There is really no way to even the score…it’s not like we can kill him again.
The statistics above are not intended to represent the complete total of all Americans killed by bin laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Mostly because, I don’t have the heart to delve into the outrageously high suicide rate among American war Veterans that has accompanied TBI and PTS or all the “Accidental Overdoses” from multiple medications prescribed by Military and VA Doctors to “treat” the physical and mental traumas caused by multiple deployments. However, they can’t go completely without mention. I can’t forget them. The numbers above also don’t take into account the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the U.S.S. Cole, or the thousands of Muslims killed by bin Laden before 9/11 or the “collateral damage” victims in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan since the wars began. Nor have I calculated the thousands who continue to suffer in places like Somalia because a new generation of terrorist oppressors has taken a page out of the bin Laden/Taliban playbook.

Memorial Day is about honoring the fallen.  It’s about remembering the incredibly high cost of our freedom and democracy. This Memorial Day, let’s remember the lessons learned over the last 10 years.

More On the High Cost of Free Speech

In my last blog on this subject, I unleashed my inner sailor on the Crusading Dumb-Fuck-Islamaphobe who thought it would be a neat idea to fan the flames of anti-Americanism and Islamofascism by burning a copy of the Koran just so people would pay attention to him. He claims to be a Man of God but, just like the idiots from the WBC (Westborough Baptist Coo-coo’s Nest) who stage protests at funerals of Fallen Soldiers it’s all about getting people to notice them.

Well thanks to a small Muslim minority (what King Abdullah II of Jordan called in his book, “takfiris”) the insignificant little Dumb-Fuck’s Attention Whoring has led to disaster. While I believe this trivial little Dumb-Fuck is just as responsible for the deaths and destruction as the fanatics who lost their shit over what he did. I also believe that these fanatics (who actually make up a small minority in the global Muslim community) are the reason that Islam has such a bad (and scary) reputation in the West. King Abdullah II (a devout Muslim) using the Salafi movement as a benchmark for intolerance, describes the this minority in his book Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril. Below is an excerpt from that book.

“Salafi leaders disregard this tradition of learning and do not accept a plurality of scholarship in Islamic thought. Instead, they insist that they have a privileged understanding of Islam based on their own interpretation of the Quran. One of the problems with this approach is that it does not contain the internal judicial checks and balances of the mainstream faith, and it is not accepting of other learned opinions.

The takfiris take this exclusivism further and use it to justify their distorted version of Islam. They believe they have the right to kill heretics, and to denounce as such those who disagree with their doctrines. They would kill whenever and wherever they can.”

Yes, the Crusading Dumb-Fuck’s insatiable need for attention has bloodied his hands but, the Government of Afghanistan isn’t blameless in all of this chaos. Hamid Karzai has allowed an atmosphere of ignorance and hate to exist. This catastrophic failure on his part is just another example of Afghanistan under his leadership.  You know who else has blood on their hands; the intolerant Ass-Holes who used the incident as an excuse for violence. Let’s not forget that this is the same ideology that laid the foundation for the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. In their narrow hypocritical view of Islam; it’s perfectly acceptable to spit on other people’s religion and brush Afghanistan’s rich cultural history (that doesn’t conform to their Holier-than-Thou image of an Islamic Country) under the asian rug…but show any measure of disrespect to THEIR Religion and the results are death and destruction. Let me just use my First Amendment Right to say one thing to these Ass-Holes; If your religious belief system is so fragile that it can’t stand up to the slightest criticism without you flying off the freakin’ handle, then perhaps you should re-evaluate your fucking beliefs. The Muslims I know don’t lose their shit over someone else’s uneducated, hateful and pathetic opinions.

One of the truly saddest aspects of these events is that the fact that while the takfiris rioters where angry over what an American Crusading Dumb-Fuck did (in exercising his American right to freedom of expression – selfish and childish as that expression was) to satisfy his whorish need for attention, they targeted UN aid workers…none of them were even American. According to the UN, four were Nepalese guards and three were Europeans from Romania, Sweden and Norway.