SHAME ON AMERICA FOR TURNING THE TRAGEDY OF FERGUSON, MISSOURI INTO A POLITICAL CIRCUS!

SHAME ON AMERICA FOR TURNING THE TRAGEDY OF FERGUSON, MISSOURI INTO A POLITICAL CIRCUS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 21, 2014

A READER WRITES:

Theory:  Everything makes sense if you have all the data and the right perspective.  If something’s not making sense, then we’re missing one or both.  That is usually the case.

In the cases of these incidents, people rush off to make judgments,  not just lacking crucial data, but on data that has been INTENTIONALLY misrepresented by the media and others with vested interest. 

Later, when the facts come out in a rational setting, and the end doesn’t result in the desired crucifixion, people just assume the legal process is corrupt.  

In fact, it’s the information process that is corrupt.  We’ve seen this over, and over, and over again.  As long as people are more committed to ‘winning’ that to truth, it will continue.

In the early ‘90’s, I almost shot a man who was breaking through our front door in a rage, looking for his unfaithful wife.  (Friend of my wife’s; not my paramour.) 

Thank God, he retreated when I said I was armed and would shoot.  (I had no choice.  He was a huge beast and enraged.  Cyndi was in the bedroom dialing 911, but there was no time.)

I can tell you that the real scenario is not like the theoretical scenario.  It’s not like training at the range.  It’s not like TV.  It’s not like you imagine.  It’s amazing that the body can create that much adrenalin. 

It’s hard to describe in words; you kind of go on autopilot. Your whole body is electrified – shaking. The instinct, and it’s overwhelming, is to pull the trigger and keep pulling.  It’s very difficult to judge these situations third party unless you’ve been there.  

Things happen really fast.

At the bottom of all this, while a country debates and exploits the situation, a set of parents have lost their son, in a fairly horrible way. I pray for their peace, and I say shame, shame, shame on America for turning this into a political circus. Shame.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

As always, there is much wisdom in what you say. 

I have never owned a gun, but I have always worried, especially when I was young, that as you put it, the adrenalin would flow, and I would hurt someone. 

I have always had a quiet rage simmering under the surface. 

It has been reassuring to reach this elder state with only one occasion when it erupted, and that was on the USS Salem (CA-139) when reacting to a guy hitting me hard in the biceps, as he often did going down the gangway to chow as he passed, seeing himself as something of a hard ass.

With all that time at sea, and tiring of just reading, for the first and only time, I worked out in the weight room on the hanger deck nearly every night.  I bulked up to 16 ½ inch biceps and a 33 inch waistline.  So, I was in pretty good shape. 

For some reason, on this one occasion, I said to him, “Don’t ever do that again!”

He looked at me in astonishment, and then attempted to do just that.  I grabbed his arm, threw him on the deck, then picked him up by the hair, gave him a bear hug, and collapsed him lung and broke two of his ribs. 

Guys saw it and rushed him off to sickbay, contacted the ship’s doctor who managed to save his life.  Meanwhile, they covered for me, all who knew he was a hard case, saying he fell down the gangplank.  He never said otherwise, perhaps being too embarrassed to have a corpsman, a “pecker checker,” do this to him.

Were I to have been cited for the incident I would have gotten a disciplinarian Captain's Mast, or worse.  Had he died, well, I would have had a very different life, now wouldn't I? 

The remarkable thing, and why my temperament has always confused me, is that I am essentially passive, and certainly not combative.  I was combative on the high school football field in games because I was given permission to hit people there, and did so with surprising relish.  But once the game was over, I changed back to my passive non-combative self.

That is why I say, life can change in an instant.

Now, I understand Michael Brown was of some size at eighteen.  I was six-four and 190 at that age, and as solid as granite, but I was white.  God only knows what that officer felt when he unloaded his service revolver on that young man, who was black. 

Fear comes to mind.  In South Africa, men of Swahili origin, black as ebony, and my size or bigger, a regal race, my wonder is what a confrontation with that sort might be in Ferguson, Missouri.

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Growing up in Iowa, where few African Americans resided at the time, I never developed the fears or the biases associated with blacks. One of my high school football teammates was black, and he was a terrific player.  At university, the smartest man I knew was also black, and I have had black friends all my life.  

How can you know people of another race if you have no contact with them, and see them only in caricature terms?

Ferguson, Missouri was a cauldron in which what happened was inevitable.  What has followed, however, was not.  This has been mismanaged at every level, and is an indictment of the system.  Social justice demands freedom and structure, education and decency, or otherwise the individual is crushed by the system.          

In that sense, I don't think you can reduce the circumstances to a moral argument, especially when the morality of our times is a kind of sickening collective paranoia. 

Thank goodness you never shot that man!  But I hear you!  The mind vacates when the adrenalin takes over. 

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