AMERICA AND JUSTICE FOR HER BLACK CITIZENS - STILL FUMBLING AT THE CROSSROADS. PT.1

America has to find an acceptable and mutually beneficial criminal justice system to bridge the chasm between them and its African American citizens.
Yesterday 11 police officers were shot in Dallas, resulting in 5 of them dying. These 11 officers were innocent people carrying out their police duties. Dallas, incidentally, was also the place where John F Kennedy was assassinated so many decades ago, and here we have, in July 2016, only 3 days after America celebrated her Independence Day, another even greater tragedy, resulting in the loss of 5 lives, occurred.

John F Kennedy was the US President who, doubtlessly reflecting his speech writer's words, became known for the dictum, "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." It is time for all progressive and prudent Americans, of all ethnic groups, to come together to advocate and effect positive changes. The tragedies of recent days and the past should not be used as fuel to increase police repression of African Americans, but as impetus to reform the police and judiciary

Considering the continuing tragedies which are occurring in the United States, it would appear that the country has, for the past several years, been fumbling around, dazed and concussed, at the cross roads of making 'fundamental positive changes to her law enforcement systems versus business as usual.'

It would seem that the United States, more specifically, its government and its elites, are finding it very difficult, if not impossible, to think straight and to 'do the right thing' to begin to get their country out of the self-destructive mode of police repression of its African American citizens, which is gripping it.

Yesterday I heard a woman, an American called Nakia Jones, on Radio 4, poignantly pouring out her despair and pain about what some of her fellow police officers are doing to African Americans. She was profoundly affected by watching a video of police officers killing an African American. 

I can understand how she felt, because I also felt deeply emotional and conflicted when I watched the video of the police officers murdering Alton Sterling, and of another police officer pointing his gun at Diamond Reynolds, as her boyfriend laid immobile in the driver's seat, blood soaked.

The first thing which might come to the mind of any reasonable person watching this video, is, why is nobody attending to Philando Castile? Why is police officer not helpin him, instead pointing the gun at her girlfriend, apparently read to shoot her as well, were he to 'feel that his life is in some danger', however tenuously so?

And then I watched the police, while holding down Alton Sterling, calmly reached for his gun, took it and pointed it at Mr Sterling's body, and, callously - as you might hold and subdue an animal, and then slaughter it - murdered him.

To be continued.

United and equal or separate an unequal; America needs to decide