Existing biases dictate how you see grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo.

By David McElroy · November 24, 2014

Take a look at this picture. It reveals the decision of the Ferguson grand jury. Tell me what you see.

I’m writing this before the grand jury decision is announced, but click here for the obligatory link I’ll add. By the time you read this, many people are outraged. I don’t have a clue what the decision will be, but I can guarantee that something about it — and the aftermath of its announcement — will confirm the worst of what millions of people believe.

If Officer Darren Wilson is indicted, it would confirm for many people that cops are killers and deserve to be attacked. For others, it would confirm that civilized society is under assault by those who are being allowed to destroy it — and that our valiant protectors are being harmed.

If Wilson is not indicted, it would confirm for many people that an evil and corrupt system is willing to let white cops murder young black men without accountability. For others, the aftermath would confirm that they need to prepare for a race war against lawless hoodlums.

It’s not a pretty picture. I suspect things are going to get ugly.

I don’t have an opinion about whether Wilson should be indicted, because I’ll never know the facts. Based on the available information, I suspect Wilson handled the situation is a way that escalated it and that he could have made better choices that would have led to a better outcome. (I also strongly suspect he was following his training to always be in charge of a situation.)

At the same time, the idea that Michael Brown didn’t do anything wrong seems increasingly suspect to me. Some of the evidence that’s come out suggests the early reports that he had his hands up aren’t true. Maybe he did struggle with Wilson and go after his gun. I just don’t know. I can’t know.

Anyone who claims to know is looking at an inkblot and coming up with what his existing biases tell him — and that’s true for everyone with dogmatic positions about this.

I agree that there is a serious problem with police misconduct in this country. I’ve experienced minor examples of abuse of power myself, and officers have recently told me numerous stories off the record of things they’ve been involved with — or shut their eyes to seeing. Police culture is sick and something needs to change.

Minority groups are right to be concerned that “walking while black” or “driving while Hispanic” are the sorts of things that put them at risk with police. Anyone who denies that those things happen is ignoring reality.

On the other hand, if the leaders of those groups would spend more efforts to rebuild their communities — both economics and family structure — as they do on political protests and lobbying for tax money, I suspect we would see a change in the current sad fact that minorities are grossly overrepresented among criminals.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. I can point a few fingers on some issues and suggest a few things that could make a difference on both sides, but the core issue is so entrenched — and trust is so low on both sides — that I don’t see any reasonable or simple answers.

Whatever the decision of the grand jury is, what people see in the decision will tell us a lot about their existing beliefs, but not much about what actually happened.

What really happened between Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown? I will never know. You will never know. But that’s not going to stop most people from confidently asserting “the truth” about what happened.

Something has to change in the racial dynamics of this country, because things like this are going to happen more and more frequently. People will die. Communities will burn. Both sides’ beliefs are going to become hardened. Before long, nobody will even care about the facts, because everyone will be certain he already knows the truth.

Maybe we’ve already reached that point.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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