Well, if there is a silver lining...

Not that I am ignorant, or don't appreciate 'current events', but I'm going to admit to playing only peripheral attention to the events in Ferguson, Missouri.  The attention that I have been paying is because the headlines(which yes, I know are designed to catch your eye) made me check to see if Ferguson was a strangely named town in Irag, or if it really IS a town in Missouri.

To me, it sounds like just another sad story.  Is it possible that the police overreacted?  Sounds like it.  Was this young man who was shot a pure as the driven snow like he was originally portrayed to be?  Nope. 

Is this story exposing the fact that there is a HUGE amount of latent anger looking for a chance to explode in our country?

Boy Howdy. 

One of the more interesting stories that I have read is by a young man of color named Rembert Browne who writes for a website called Grantland, which is predominantly sports and pop culture website(which is why I was there in the first place).   Being not quite young anymore, and having never been a man of color, I found it insightful, especially how things just kind of 'happen' when you get a crowd together...and how a group of protesters can evolve(or be shaped by outside influences) in to a riot. 

Here is hoping that things are starting to cool down a bit.  Sending in the State Police and forcing the locals to take a step back is a step in the right direction...help remove some of the emotion from things. 

It's a sad story, with minimal chance of a happy ending.  The only possible positive to come from this is the attention being drawn to something you and I have known about for a while now...the increasing militarization of the Every Town USA Police Department.  The increasingly realization that while there is a 99.98% chance that the individual officer driving a cruiser in your neighborhood is polite and helpful beyond belief, Police Departments as an Institution are increasingly willing to take a hard stance against anyone questioning their authority. 

My wife, who is more 'across the board' in her politics than I am, noted that on facebook, both her 'right wing wacko' and 'left wing wacko' friends have arrived at the same conclusion, and post the same pictures and memes about out of control police on their pages.  That has to mean something. 

The question is, what?  And, will it matter?  Will the sight of 150 armored police officers and armored cars with mounted machine guns on them stay with people long for them to want to change anything? 

We are already in the heart the NFL's preseason.  Distracting shiny objects are always on the horizon.