I lived through the late 60s as a juice-boxer before there were juice-boxes, so I really don't have any coherent memories of the era from a political perspective beyond what I have learned as an teenager and adult of the era as history. We didn't have the Internet and a 24/7 news cycle to drive news and make local issues national ones in hours if it hits the right nerve.
That being said, the current level of rhetoric is a bit hot on the topic of police interaction with black suspects. This Fox piece on the NYPD arresting some anti-cop hot-heads for threatening cops online, along with shots of Guy Fawkes-masked protestors on the news had me thinking of the Black Power era pig-haters.
However, there was also a lot more real brutality going on in that era as opposed to the bad-judgement of a couple of cops in the Ferguson and Staten Island cases of 2014. You don't have the "do you want to go peacefully or do you prefer internal bleeding?" stuff nearly as much in the early 21st century as opposed to the mid 20th. The angst of that era seems more real rather than somewhat contrived.
We didn't have Fox News playing up the outrages of the pig-haters for the Silent Majority of the 10s or CNN playing up the outrages of the cops for their target audience. A half-hour news window at 6:30PM Eastern limited what got covered back in the day, nor did it have as much partisan spin attached on the news.
That being said, we seem to have an odd merger of the spiritual grandchildren of Stokey Carmichael and El Cleaver with your white intelligentsia anarchosocialists with their Guy Fawkes masks, both with an interest in anarchy in the inner city. There's likely a silent majority of blacks and whites who don't see the cops as an occupying force, but they don't get on TV.
It seems troubling, but there also seems to be a magnification of the issue by the modern media. It bleeds and leads, making good TV and good link fodder. It feels like it's about 10% of the ferver of the 60s magnified 6.5X by the modern media to the point where it brings back images of the Rodney King riots for modern adults and "burn, baby, burn" memories for Boomers.
I don't have any good answers other than for folks to understand God's love a bit more and to show that to others. That will help take the chip off the black youth's shoulder and to have everyone else not assume the youth is a crime-spree looking to happen. That's easier said than done.
A cop-free world is an anarchy with gated communities and shootouts at 2:15AM outside of those gates. I don't want to live in that world.
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