A few days ago, 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant was shot in the head and killed by a monster. This monster was soon arrested, is now in prison without bond, and will likely die there once justice is done. This is how the system is supposed to work every time whether a white man shoots his wife or a Samoan mass shooter murders 20 Cannons in a classroom, or a robbery between a Hispanic and Muslim ends in murder. We cannot prevent all crimes so the system exists to do exactly what it did for little Cannon when we fail to stop the monster.
But every few pages of social media tells me I should be outraged for little Cannon. I should stand FOR Cannon and demand justice. It’s not that these people asking me are unaware of developments in the case. They’ve shared with me the photo of the monster in jail and links declaring police are now moving into a phase where the justice system is taking over.
So what am I supposed to be protesting? That he wasn’t killed in police custody? That he wasn’t lynched on his way to jail? Is that the dog whistle? Because I don’t see that the police and justice system CAN do more than they are.
So let me respond to this request for herd rage directly.
Monsters come in all shapes, sizes, genders, creeds, and races. Funny how this is when the pundit media is so concerned with the death of a child, crying crocodile tears over it like they ever really cared. The pundits don’t interrupt their blistering oratory and fearmongering to announce every Amber Alert or to share the shocking news that a child died of starvation while locked in his shit-covered bedroom because his white, Christian parents couldn’t care for him but enjoyed collecting the welfare payments his suffering earned them.
Did that seem oddly specific?
Do you remember them? No? Google the Tutko family of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and remind me where your Internet outrage was then for that child and his siblings. Where was Tucker Carlson’s grand bag of lung farts when that tragedy broke?
If you want to cherry-pick this case to imply this monster represents all black people, I can share the tales of white monsters all the live-long day that I’m pretty sure never even made it onto your radar. And you will be ashamed and sickened by the horrors they visited on innocents. But will you care enough to have the real conversation about the gap between rich and poor, the corruption and rot that grows in people denied any opportunity to live among us modest “haves”?
Let’s say you get your wish and the monster is lynched. What have you solved? Jack and Shit.
Let’s say the BLM movement fulfills your wish that they just shut up and go away. What does that solve? Is that your idea of “justice” for Cannon? Are you thinking that it means no more children will die from homicide? You know it won’t. You only want silence and for the loud people to suffer in it for your convenience.
You just want to repeat that the entire debate comes down to a white child murdered by a monster who happens to be black. I’m outraged because it happened at all. I’m outraged because millionaire shit-gibbons like Tucker Carlson, along with most people, wouldn’t give two shits and a salute about Cannon Hinnant even if the shooter had been his own father. Some of you living truck-nuts might even vomit up the old chestnut that “its the price of freedom!”
“Oh what a tragedy, his dad was aiming for the liquor cabinet and hit his child “by mistake. We hope people can give this family time and privacy to grieve.”
But to the conservatives who love to say liberal media doesn’t share news that doesn’t fit “the narrative” this fits the conservative one quite nicely doesn’t it? For a group of people who claim to be so firmly in the know about how the real world works and understand exactly how biased and skewed “the media” is, you sure enjoy this flavor of Kool-Aid, so much that you’ll politicize a child’s corpse to try to score a point you can’t even make without exposing the deep racism at its core.
Fucking stop it. You are better than this.
Rather than focus on the needs of the one, remember that BLM and other movements for civil rights are a response to the kind of tyranny conservatives LOVE pretending to stand up against. Only, it seems you love this form of tyranny because you stand with the tyrants. Your guns are safely locked away as masked gunmen pull citizens into unmarked vans and released only with a legally binding promise to relinquish their First Amendment right to protest further.
Face it, folks, we’re the ones out here, mostly unarmed, defending YOUR freedom and I only see you guys gunned-up to bitch about having to wear a mask. If you’re so fucking brave, why the Kevlar? If God’s going to protect you from a bug, surely he loves you enough to stop bullets, too, right?
Anyway. I get it. You don’t see the injustice in a group of people you know nothing about, refuse to interact with, and routinely refer to as inferior. Your life is not perfect, so why should someone else get to complain? And I know that some days the only thing that holds your dignity intact is the illusion that you are somehow superior because you were LUCKY enough to be born in America and white.
Unfortunately, we have bigger problems than your world view. You can ignore those problems and focus on the looting and the violence, throw pictures of a dead child in our faces, but history consistently files your behaviors in the “this is who they overcame” section of the narrative. Don’t be that guy whose entire life is immortalized by a photo of him in a suit smiling as he helps hold up the corpse of a beaten black man who dared use active sentence structure in front of a white man.
