Stood in the street, didn't get tear gassed. Go figure.
Only one thing happened in August, and it is recognizable by a single name:
Ferguson. Every single solitary sodding thing that happened before, during and after that fateful shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, deserves its own place on a
worst thing to happen in a damn long while list. The
police response. The
media. The
hangers-on. The
politicians. Did I mention
the media?
In the end we have to narrow our chosen brimstonal jackassery of the month to something more specific. I'm going to give this one to the National Review, the "respectable" conservative magazine that finds itself flirting with white supremacists on a regular basis, that was founded on a bedrock of staunch segregationist policies, and which has never in the intervening decades once sussed out that perhaps they ought to just shut their gaping yaps it comes to issues on race in America.
The National Review, you see, was bored.
Possibly the most sickening thing about America is its racial selectivity. White person kills white person. Zzzzz. Black person kills black person. Zzzzz. Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops. Or explodes.
If that was not the least interesting thing anyone could possibly have to say about the police shooting and subsequent protests in a still-deeply segregated St. Louis, it was damn close. No, the problem with the continued pattern of law enforcement officers beating or killing unarmed black men was, in the National Review psyche, that the petty rabble felt it was worth talking about
at all.
Lest this be dismissed as the result of one writer's ongoing battle with sleeping pills, the editor of the magazine took to Politico to revise and extend the magazine's remarks. The problem was not the shooting. The problem was the protest.
The chant “no justice, no peace” is an apt rallying cry for Ferguson, Missouri, where protesters don’t truly want justice and there has been no peace. [...]
But the world should have better things to do than watch what are, in the scheme of things (and up to this point), relatively minor clashes between police and a handful of protesters.
As representative sample of the worst of America, that gets the top marks. It may not be the single worst thing said by a pundit trying to wrap their minds around why all these persons on the street seemed (but probably were not actually) angry, but because it is said by the National Review, the magazine of ongoing notions of white leadership and white superiority, it should be remembered as example of
why we live in a society where protests such as those, and the ones that have happened since, must take place. Faced with a thousand chanting people, some of the self-declared thought leaders of the nation shift in their chairs and declare that no, they can't hear a thing.
Oh, and I suppose August was the month Rick Perry was indicted. Guess how much that's affected his presidential plans. And when was the last time you even heard a member of the press mention Rick Perry's indictment?