The Post has weighed in with this editorial which sums up pretty nicely the facts and opinions presented so far. This guy has an opinion that meshes well with mine … though he’s a bit more direct in his choice of words.
I’m fixated on this. I know I shouldn’t be, that I should worry about other things, concentrate on work, or something … but my mind is captured, captivated, unable to look away from the horrible meaninglessness of the whole situation.
The fact is, it’s so close to home. I’m okay living day to day in a country that is killing off 5 to 10 of it’s young men and women every day in service to our low oil prices … where dozens per day die in the inner cities for even less reason than Aaron. I can wake up, go about my business, and not be bothered except in short doses of irritation, polemic, or rage. Those deaths are distant from me. Somehow, this one death is opening up quite a bit of suppressed rage and disappointment … and I’m left looking for something to do with the energy. But for a few trivial details, my brother would have been in that car … though his presence would have deflected the situation just enough to change the entire dynamic. But for a few years of distance, I might have been in that back seat myself.
The appropriate question is “what could we change to prevent this happening again?” The answer, sadly, is not much. It seems that laws are already in place to try to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. Hopefully the police department will do the right thing and dismiss this officer, who through his own choices endangered himself and wound up killing the wrong person. Hopefully people will wake up just a bit to the disturbingly high level of violence in our day to day life. However, I think that at root the answer remains that this is part of the cost of having armed men protect us from each other, that they sometimes kill the wrong person.
Hopefully after the funeral, after the coverage dies down, after my family returns to its usual patterns, my mind will settle back to its normal placid state of happiness. For now, I’m off to the gym to try to tire myself out a bit.
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