Editorial:
In January, the customary greeting to our family and friends is a sincere, “Happy New Year!” But only two weeks into the New Year, it does not feel very happy.
The New Year started with the funeral of a New York police officer, Wenjian Liu, who was killed along with this partner, Rafael Ramos, while they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn. The person who killed him, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, took his own life shortly after killing the officers. He wrote on social media that he was avenging the deaths of unarmed black men who had been killed by police, specifically referring to Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in July after an officer put him in a chokehold.
At the funeral of Officer Liu, when the mayor on New York City, Bill de Blasio, got up to speak the officers en mass turned their back on the mayor. Mayor de Blasio has been critical of police tactics and vowed to investigate the incident and to seek reforms in the department. The Police felt a lack of support and under attack by the media and citizens of New York, following months of anti-police demonstrations.
January 5, again in the Bronx, two plain officers were shot following a robbery. For many it seemed as if the shooting was an ambush.
On January 6 at an El Paso Veterans Affairs clinic, VA psychologist Timothy Fjordbak, 63, was allegedly shot and killed by Jerry Serrato, 48. Serrato then took his own life.
This past Wednesday, we learned of the tragic attack on the French satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people died. The killings were in response to the satirical cartoons about the Muslim religion and for this 12 people are now dead.
The first two weeks on the New Year have been nothing short of depressing. If this is a prelude to the rest of the year then we as a nation are trouble! The act of killing seems to be an automatic response, and this has to change!
There will have to be a new perspective on Police and community relations. At present it has boiled down to an attitude of us against them, with the police feeling under siege and targeted by some. A kill or be killed attitude is pervasive. If this scenario continues, in the long run the police will win as they become more militarized, and shooting deaths will continue.
The problem with a new perspective is that it takes time, a lot of time. The communities need to stand up for their rights, and protest injustice whenever and wherever this occurs. But protests should not include killing another person. With Martin Luther King Jr. Day just around the corner we need to follow his lead of a non-violent form of protest for change.
This new perspective must start at the top with the President and spread on down to congress. Sadly, the path toward a new perspective took a decided U-turn when newly sworn Republican Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, as described by Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, “gave a remarkably angry and ungracious first speech to the body he now leads. It was an 18-minute snarl, dripping with contempt and packed with campaign-style barbs for the president.”
As we have seen in the past it is this kind of leadership that leads to anger, distrust, and partisan politics. This then filters down to the general public, where communities take up sides and lines are drawn in the sand.
Two weeks into the year and we are already on the defensive. This doesn’t bode well for a Happy New Year!