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Friday, January 28, 2022

I Guess That I Was Mistaken About Dr. King

 At least from this request from Biden's DOJ on why a rioter who started a fire that killed a person in the store deserves a shorter sentence:

On June 5, 2020, a man named Oscar Lee Stewart, 30, was reported missing to the Burnsville Police Department by his mother. Mr. Stewart’s mother reported that she had not seen her son since May 28, 2020. Investigators learned that Mr. Stewart’s vehicle had been found near the Max It Pawn. On July 20, 2020, authorities located Mr. Stewart’s body in the rubble of the Max It Pawn. Mr. Stewart’s remains were submitted to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office. That office attributed Mr. Stewart’s death to “probable inhalation of products of combustion and thermal injury (building fire).”...

There appear also to have been many people who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised, and who were attempting, in many cases in an unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, to give voice to those feelings. Mr. Lee appears to be squarely in this latter category. And even the great American advocate for non-violence and social justice, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stated in an interview with CBC’s Mike Wallace in 1966 that “we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.” Lily Rothman, What Martin Luther King Jr Really Thought About Riots, Time Magazine (2015), https://time.com/3838515 

The full quote reveals something about how poorly the War on Poverty achieved its goal:

“I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.” 

Remember that.  Upset about what they perceived (right or wrong) as a stolen election will not lead to a lessening of sentences for Jan. 6 defendants, nor should it.  But remember, if you are angry enough, killing someone by arson is just "the language of the unheard." 

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