Sometimes there really are no words…
(CNN) Jacob Blake, who remains hospitalized after sustaining multiple injuries, is now handcuffed to his bed, his family said.
Blake's uncle told CNN on Thursday that Blake's father visited the Wauwatosa, Wisconsin hospital where his son is recovering from at least one surgery. He was "heartbroken" to see that his son was handcuffed.
"This is an insult to injury," Justin Blake, the uncle of the victim, said. "He is paralyzed and can't walk and they have him cuffed to the bed. Why?"
Let’s be clear. Mr. Blake, who is Black, was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer wearing a badge that issued from the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police department.
The same Kenosha police department whose chief, Daniel Miskinis, blamed people protesting the murderous acts of this officer when a white, Trump-supporting domestic terrorist named Kyle Rittenhouse shot two of those protesters dead on Tuesday.
The same Kenosha police department that now apparently considers a paralyzed Black man whose life it has effectively ruined as somehow deserving of being handcuffed to a hospital bed.
Kenosha police and sheriff's department, as well as the district attorney's office, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNN has reached out to the Blake family's attorneys.
A spokesperson with the Froedtert Hospital, where Blake is being treated, deferred CNN's questions to the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
For anyone living under a rock somewhere who may still be wondering what the protests are really all about, for those who, after this shooting, after George Floyd’s murder, after all the others, still may not “get it,” you’d think this would finally be a wake-up call for such people.
But it won’t be. Because tonight the man they’ve decided is their role model is speaking to a tightly packed crowd of white faces, telling them that everything is just fine with race relations in this country, that police aren’t racists, and by the way, warning of dire chaos and rampaging black people in their suburbs if Americans don’t hire him for another four years:
And I say very modestly that I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president.
And I have done more in three years for the Black community than Joe Biden has done in 47 years.
He says all these things, and people smile and nod. Some even cheer. Because it's not that they don't "get it." It's that they don't care.
Meanwhile Mr. Blake lies very still, handcuffed to a hospital bed.
