Double Standard ?

On the morning of Superbowl 52, Edwin Jackson, a linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts, was killed by a drunk drinker who struck the Uber driver's car he had taken.  Unfortunately, outside of the pseudo-celebrity of being a professional football player, this tragedy would not warrant an expanded space in the bandwidth of incessant bad news that seems to clog the airwaves of almost every major network in this country.  However, this story will be re-purposed into a dystopic diatribe rife with xenophobia, nationalism and an unsavory mix of growing anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by an America First mantra that wreaks of a kind of stench directed at far too many people that don't fit the profile of the picture featured in this blog.

Every year tens of thousands of people lose their lives because good ol' American citizens get behind the wheel of a car after drinking well beyond the limits of sobriety.  Our obsession with spirits, brews, and wine has us consuming them by the millions of gallons and despite their capacity to create chemical dependence and absolutely destroy personal health and households, they are marketed with a fervor second to none.  There is nothing intrinsically evil about adult libations. Every beer commercial comes with a disclaimer to "drink responsibly" yet the built in fatality model of alcohol-related deaths associated with car crashes is kind of a given in our culture.

I am highlighting the death of Edwin Jackson by a twice-deported Guatemalan as a flash point that will be toxically politicized at the expense of a far less popular reality-death by flag-waving, stand for the National Anthem, card-carrying NRA member Americans.

James Alexis Fields, whose mugshot I feature, deliberately ran over Heather Hyer at a rally in the polemic gathering of "alt-right and "alt-left' advocates in Charlottesville.  American Naval Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry is credited with the phrase, " We have met the enemy and they are ours." America has a disdainful history of singling out the segment of its population that they believe is the source of all its societal ills.  Yet when mass murders, gross violations of the Geneva Conventions, Wall Street pilfering, industrial-scale fraud in Washington and a smorgasbord of other malfeasance is committed by Opie Taylor, there is no national outcry to form internment camps, deport or ostracize a demographic that occupies every seat of power in this country.  Our hubris, our narcissism, our rank hypocrisy makes these impassioned cries to " get them ( illegal immigrants) outta here" ring hollow.  There is an innate tone deafness when it comes to the face of criminality
in America.

Don't worry, many people are not buying the double standard!