should consider that, despite the crap we put up with constantly - and have had to deal with for centuries and still endure to this very minute every ... single ... day - we have not turned on our country or our fellow Americans and we continue to love, support, defend, fight for and protect this nation and it’s inhabitants and institutions that still, all-too-often, treat us like we just don’t belong.
That’s love, baby.
So, I don’t want to hear another word about our “patriotism” - unless it’s to thank us for being so awesome about it.
Our president ignores an American hero: Trump’s silence on the Waffle House murders is deafening
James Shaw Jr. disarmed a mass shooter single-handed. Everything about that is a problem for Donald Trump
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
APRIL 24, 2018
During the early morning hours last Sunday, a 29-year-old white man named Travis Reinking allegedly used an AR-15 rifle to kill four people and injure two others at a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville. Reinking is reportedly a member of the Sovereign Citizens, a right-wing extremist movement that is heavily influenced by white supremacist political ideology. It is likely not a coincidence that all of Reinking's victims were nonwhite.
A 29-year-old black man named James Shaw Jr. disarmed Reinking by grabbing the barrel of his AR-15. Shaw is the true definition of a hero. He acted selflessly, without training or compensation, and at great personal risk.
...
During those few minutes last Sunday morning in a Waffle House, a mini-drama of American life in the age of Trump took place. A young black man protected the public from a white man hell-bent on committing mass murder. In America, black men are all too often subjected to harassment, state-sponsored violence and racial profiling. By comparison, white men -- even when they are mass murderers or domestic terrorists -- are described by default as "nice" and "normal" people who are "lone wolves" or suffer from mental illness. Their crimes come as a surprise and not indicative of a broader "cultural problem" among the "white community."
The patrons at the Nashville Waffle House were lucky that James Shaw Jr. was not arrested and kicked out for trespassing like the two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks store last week. If the manager in Nashville had a case of "negrophobia" like his peer in Philadelphia, more people might have died. On the same day that Shaw saved lives in a Nashville, a black woman was arrested, stripped almost naked, and brutalized by police at a different Waffle House, a few hundred miles away in Alabama. Her crime? She complained to the manager about why her party had been charged for plastic utensils, when on a previous visit they had not been.
America's police routinely claim that they were in fear for their lives and "had no choice" after they kill unarmed or otherwise vulnerable black and brown people. James Shaw Jr., who had neither weapons nor police training, disarmed a killer with his bare hands.
And once again a white man who commits mass murder is captured alive, while black and brown people who are unarmed, talking on telephones, sitting in their cars, sleeping or generally minding their own business are killed by America's police nearly as a matter of routine. Reinking, who is accused of four murders, was even offered bond by a judge -- although in the face of public outrage this has since been revoked. Do you believe that a black or brown person credibly accused of mass murder would be given the opportunity to go free while awaiting trial?
https://www.salon.com/2018/04/24/our-president-ignores-an-american-hero-trumps-silence-on-the-waffle-house-murders-is-deafening/
