As I am sure many of you already have, I have spent quite a bit of time wondering about the goings on in Ferguson, Missouri and about how a police officer could shoot and kill an unarmed citizen in the manner in which he did.
Of course already several weeks have passed since the incident and the internet and airwaves have been filled with a myriad of reasonings as to why this tragedy occurred. Was the police officer frightened or doing his duty or protecting the public? Was he scared or in fear of his life as some have suggested? Was he a racist? Or perhaps…the young unarmed victim had it coming? Or was a thug who deserved to be shot? Or maybe he was just so big and scary that his entire frightening self was more dangerous than any police officer with a gun could ever be?
Or maybe if the young man had simply just done what he was told to do by an authority figure this just never would have happened…
But after thinking about it for quite a while it dawned on me that perhaps the reason for this fatal occurrence between these two vastly different people was a much simpler one.
The police officer shot and killed the man because…he could.
And the eventual victim of that shot behaved in the manner in which he did because…he couldn’t.
I believe that for human beings, The reasons that we have for taking a life from this world… are sometimes all too sadly… that simple…especially in a world of haves and have-nots where those two distinct poles are rapidly accelerating away from each other as they are in our societies today.
And I also believe that the solutions needn’t be any more complicated…
