Tag Archives: Bill O’Reilly

Let Them Speak

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Losing a child is an experience that alters your life forever. Parents never get over it. I know this firsthand.

Last Wednesday, 17 students lost their lives in Parkland, Florida. The grief and loss that follows parents burying their adult child brings with it shock, and a host of other powerful emotions. The only solace they might feel in the days, weeks, months (and beyond) often comes from the kind and empathetic people that come alongside them and share in their loss.

When a tragedy has a public component, then this means the media comes calling. Parents, along with fellow classmates, will be asked an incessant line of questions—some of them invasive and even, just plain heartless and worse—stupid.

My son wasn’t gunned down with an assault rifle, but when the car impacted his body along U.S. 90 in Crestview, Florida, killing him immediately, he was just as dead. My wife and I have been picking up the pieces of our lives ever since—we’ve now passed the one-year anniversary, and continue counting.

I’m not going to say I know exactly what the parents of the 17 classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland are feeling today and have been for a week. I will say I have a sense about what the pain feels like—for me, it felt like my heart was ripped from my chest.

When a son or daughter is murdered like their children were, and the media turns it into a circus primarily to enhance ratings (and sell advertising), anger is never too far away. In my case, I ended up telling a writer from a major newspaper to “fuck off” when all she cared about was including Mark in her story about people crossing America who had been killed after being hit by a vehicle. She was heartless.

I have been amazed by the strength and resolve of students like Emma Gonzalez and Cameron Kasky, some of the more prominent classmates (among many), in speaking out forcefully in the aftermath of the mass shooting at their school. Not sure if the adults plan to follow their lead.

Students have become the leaders in Parkland, FL [Photo-Saul Martinez/NY Times]

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Not Your Friends

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Gallup released a poll last June indicating that 60 percent of whites and 48 percent of nonwhites expressed having confidence in the police. What explains the 12 percent gap? Maybe better, what about the 40 to 52 percent of us that have little or no faith in law enforcement?

Trust in the police has been declining even among whites.

Like almost everything else in America that touches on ethics, justice, and dare I say it—truth—has been on the downward slide. That’s just one of the characteristics of collapse.

Still, there are plenty of folks out there who view the police (like the military) as above reproach. The uniform and shield erects an impenetrable wall that makes them immune to criticism. The police, however, are far from being the bastions of goodness and morality that some like to see them as. This article demonstrates a different side of policing—and it isn’t about “protect and serve,” an outdated myth.

Not since the late 1960s and early 1970s have these kinds of questions increasingly been on the minds of Americans not cowered and co-opted by the mainstream media embracing a pacifist/reformist ideal about government and its protectors, like the police.

I used to work in an office with one of these “the police can do no wrong” type of tools. Come to think of it, she was a tool about just about everything else—business and politics, too—but when it came to the law enforcement fraternity, she’d rather rip your eyes out than tolerate anyone talking trash about the po-po. Her dad was a cop, so I guess that was part of the problem.

Does everything in America have to be about this kind of irrationality? I guess so.

The police are not your friends.

The police are not your friends.

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