The Rayshard Springboard

The Rayshard Springboard

It’s tough to choose between embarrassment for, or outrage at, the MSM for their characterization of Rayshard Brooks. Brooks is the 27-year-old Atlanta man who was shot and killed by Atlanta police following a horrible decision by him—while dangerously intoxicated–to aggressively resist being taken into custody after police had been called by a civilian complaining that Brooks had stalled the drive thru line after falling asleep at the wheel.

Brooks death is sad and was unnecessary, but the MSM spin about Brooks is worse than sad and unnecessary—it is gratuitously incendiary.

Rayshard Brooks’ rap sheet includes charges of: false imprisonment, battery on a family member, cruelty to children, theft, receiving stolen property, interference with custody, and obstruction of an officer.  And that’s before the Wendy’s incident.

Yet here is an ABC News headline: “Rayshard Brooks went from telling Atlanta officer about visiting mother’s grave to being fatally shot”.

And here’s an ABC affiliate in Boston on a social media post: “Rayshard Brooks’ 8-year-old daughter had her birthday dress on Saturday morning waiting for her dad to come pick her up and take her skating to celebrate her birthday [but he was shot and killed Friday night]…”

So the MSM creates a narrative of Brooks as a grieving son and loving father whose life was suddenly taken away by cops who are either racist or incompetent or both.

At the same time, Brooks’ actual rap sheet includes charges for battery on a family member and cruelty to children, and videos of the incident at Wendy’s show exactly what happened, including Atlanta cops behaving patiently and politely as an obviously drunken Brooks dissembles every which way trying to escape responsibility for being drunk, and then makes the horrible decision to resist arrest, engage in a fistfight with officers, grab for one officer’s weapon, run from the officers, and fire the weapon at the pursuing officer.

______________

The disingenuousness of the MSM is exhausting, and maybe there are still a few million Americans who don’t see it. But the number of Americans who don’t see the duplicity is falling every day, as decent, honest people of every skin color pay attention, engage and find out for themselves what an objective and truthful picture of this incident really looks like.

When they join the millions of Americans who have already seen through the duplicity, there is hope that Brooks death can be a springboard to a more productive discussion about race and culture in America.

What does that more productive discussion entail?

An important element is captured in Candace Owens’ now famous 17-minute video about George Floyd, which you can watch here. Owens properly faults Derek Chauvin, and is rightly sad for the Floyd family, but she jumps on the destructive cultural habit of black America (as originally described by black American historian Shelby Steele) to honor or glorify the ‘lowest common denominator’ of black Americans rather than illustrious, accomplished black Americans like Thomas Sowell, Condoleezza Rice, Walter Williams, Larry Elder and Steele himself. The latter have earned honors for their scholarship and leadership; Floyd and Brooks earned rap sheets.

And so one element of a more productive discussion is to explore how and why that habit should be changed, and changed now. Role models are important.

But Rayshard Brooks’ death can be a springboard for an even more important discussion—one that always seems to take longer to emerge from a hysterical over-focus on police and policing techniques: America is asking police to do too much.

A dysfunctional culture cannot be fixed or even managed by better policing. By the time the dystopian effects of decades of destruction of the family (especially the black family)—through fatherless homes, out of wedlock births, drug addictions, and government dependency; and exacerbated by failing and undisciplined public schools—reach the streets, it is beyond the capacity or function of police to correct those effects. And it is becoming extremely difficult just to manage through them without ugly and violent confrontation.

Law and order are essential to the functioning of a productive society concerned with the health, well-being and progress of all citizens. And every society will have some form of law and order—but the critical questions are: where does the law come from, and who imposes the order?

China has law and order. The law is whatever the Chinese Communist Party says it is; and the order is brutally imposed by the communist People’s Liberation Army.

America is different. Its founding documents proclaim that the law emerges from a self-governing people in a republic of three separate but equal branches of a government with limited powers. And order itself comes primarily from a self-governing people, not from a policed people.

But here is where the whole subject gets down to uncomfortable brass tacks. The godless left is apoplectic when reminded of this fact, but it is a fact: America’s historical concept of law and order is a Bible-based concept.

It’s been said the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are all the law society needs; all the rest is detail. And the order that will follow from a people devoted to living up to the Bible’s demands is an order that is policed first by the conscience of the individual citizen; actual policing is dramatically less visible or necessary.

Founding father John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And therein lies a solution for America that is hiding in plain sight—it is a return to being a ‘moral and religious people’—a people having greater familiarity with and humble respect for the eternally relevant teachings of the Bible.

America at the time of the founding was grounded in knowledge of the Bible; in colonial times children learned English by reading the Bible. But America’s modern elites have for decades been propping up a lie that it is possible for a ‘progressive’ society to move toward a post-God, post-Christian, post-truth world, administered through the ‘scientific’ knowledge and wisdom of a ruling class.

That’s been a prescription for failure since time began; it’s no different now.

So how can America go from where it is now to a place where an objective observer would again call Americans as a whole a ‘moral and religious people’?

What’s needed is a higher sense of the timeless relevance of the Bible; an understanding that no age will outgrow it. As with the challenge of America’s Bible-based founding ideals, there is never a time for outgrowing them; there is always a demand to grow into them.

That’s the calling of the times.

_____________

It may be too much to expect all that to spring from one episode in Atlanta.

America’s disgusting MSM will try to steamroll any such productive discussion using their racist America/defund the police narrative and mission. But apart from MSM narratives, the truth stands, and people can see it for themselves. And they can see the real challenge and the real solution are not going to be found in funding or defunding, or training or re-training the police. They are going to be found when Americans rediscover and reembrace their Biblically grounded heritage as the foundation for the American character.

Eric Georgatos blogs at America Can We Talk?