Z, why do you go to Evangelical sites? Is it just to piss on them? It's practically the same as me becoming a dedicated reader to the Huffington Post just so I can leave messages in their comment boxes.
EDIT: A more apt analogy might be that I visit Richard Dawkins' website and underline and post everything about him that I think is stupid.
Now, on to my current frustration: This Professor Gates fiasco.
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here's a very bare overview: Professor Gates, a black man, forgot the keys to his house and jimmied his way through the front door. The next door neighbor(a very good neighbor, if you ask me) called the cops and told them that he saw someone breaking into the professor's house. So a patrolman, a white guy, shows up at the house, asks the professor for some ID, and when asked Gates flies into a rage and accuses the cop of being racist, saying that his only crime is being a black man in America, etc.
What happens next various sources seem to argue about, but the general consensus is that Professor Gates made an ass out of himself and then Crowley arrested him for Disorderly Conduct.
It's not the immediate cry of racial profiling or racist cops that frustrated me. Hell, when I first saw the headlines I figured we were in for another Rodney King episode. But in this case, the cops didn't actually do anything wrong. The only thing remotely suspect is that the guy on duty, James Crowley actually arrested him, which you can agree or disagree with whether or not that was the best way to handle it.
But after about a week of crowding onto Crowley's lawn, protesters sending him death threats and the like, the media is just now realizing that not only Crowley is not the evil racist cop stereotype here, but that Gates made up most of the statements he gave to the press.
The charges against him have been dropped, by the way.
So now, after a whole week of whooping and hollering and crying racism, that even the President got stuck in the middle of, once the evidence about the incident(interviews with Crowley's staff, tapes from the 911 call, etc.) starting pouring out, he shuts up. No apology, no nothing except a cheesy photo op that President Obama put together with the three of them sharing a beer on the White House lawn.
It's simply not fair. This man Crowley and his family were put through hell this past week while Professor Gates got to play the victim and threaten lawsuits and look good on National Television. And it's all supposed to go away now because it makes Gates look bad.
Alright, I can understand why Gates reacted the way he did. Its not the most pleasant thing in the world to be confronted by a cop, especially as a black man. You might slip up and say something stupid. And I'm willing to concede that Crowley overreacted by arresting him too. To walk away after getting his ID and confirming that he was in his house would have been the best solution. However, due to the fact that no news source can agree on what happened during the time frame between Crowley asking for ID and Gates being arrested, I can't really say for sure.
The frustration of it is not about who overreacted, because chances are both of them probably did. The frustration is how the incident made the career of one guy and destroyed the reputation of the other. I will admit, the press didn't do too lousy a job of covering it. They did a fairly good amount of actual investigation into what actually happened.
The problem is the medium, really. When you have a Harvard Professor like Gates, backed with men like Al Sharpton and to a far lesser extent President Obama, pitted against a middle class cop on the nightly news, the result is a forgone conclusion.
It just struck me now, as I was looking over this post, how ironic it is that I felt I had to point out which one was the black guy and which one was the white guy.
This just goes to show that race relations in this country are far from gemundlich, as I've said constantly.
