For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about being a member of the baby boomer generation in relation to the discussions I'm having with friends from my generation on Facebook about police brutality. So many people of my generation thinks in terms of how things were when we were young. We could mail a letter for a five cents. We road our bikes to school. We played outside all summer long. The policeman was a friend.
I keep getting into discussions with my contemporaries trying to explain to them why people are protesting for police reform. And I keep getting the same tired arguments about not blaming all cops because of a few bad apples.
They still don’t believe that people of color are policed differently and more severely.
Last night I read an article about a protest organized by young people in a southern Illinois town. I was so impressed with those young people who organized it.
In November, I’d published a story about this small southern Illinois city’s reputation as a sundown town — a place where black people were not welcome after dark — and the legend about what Anna stands for: “Ain’t No N——— Allowed.” The article stirred up strong feelings in the town, where all public officials, police officers and nearly all teachers are white. While many current and former residents wrote to me to share their own stories about racism in the area, others decried the story as perpetuating the A-N-N-A reputation.
A Black Lives Matter protest in Anna. Who was behind it? How many people would join? What would the reaction be?
And what would this mean for A-N-N-A?
A Sundown Town Sees Its First Black Lives Matter Protest
While I was thinking about these things, "The Andy Griffith Show" popped into my head and it made me wonder. Is part of the problem because of the generation gap? We talk about how we had fire drills in school, not active shooter drills. Maybe we should be discussing how we grew up with community policing, not a militarized police. So, I put together the above graphic. Do you think it will help open a few minds into understanding that the protests are about reforming police departments because they have become too militarized?
One concern is that I don’t want to imply that we need to go back to policing in the sixties where people of color were harshly treated in a time before smart phones in almost every hand on the streets. I just thought maybe this would help people from my generation realize why so many people are protesting for change in policing. They haven’t taken the time to think about how much it has changed since we were growing up.
My progressive friends might think this is sophomoric, but they are deep thinkers who already understand what the protests are about. How will my Trump-supporter friends on Facebook see it? I also did a version using Trump’s slogan. Too much?