Guilty before proven innocent
After leaving a restaurant, you get pulled over by a police officer who assumes you were drinking, despite no evidence. You pass every test, yet are arrested for DUI anyway.
Such an unfair situation that would never unfold in America, right?
Wrong. In fact, it’s increasingly common, for in today’s “Amerika,” our rights are being systematically whittled away. Making the sin mortal, many Americans, so long as they don’t feel personally affected, accept this erosion of freedom, where hard evidence is replaced by “probablies.”
The recent situation at a Philadelphia Starbucks shows that guilty until proven innocent is becoming the new norm, but it’s just the latest situation where people are demonized first, and facts are investigated later – if at all.
Let’s look at the Starbucks situation in detail. But a word to wise: Anyone believing this is an isolated incident limited to a city coffee shop is woefully mistaken. The bar has been lowered, and the actions of irresponsible leaders have set an extremely dangerous precedent, where anyone, regardless of color, income and job, can be wrongfully accused.
The following facts are inarguable: Starbucks managers follow policies set forth by the company. The Philadelphia Starbucks had a policy that restrooms were only for paying customers. Two men were denied access to the restroom because they hadn’t bought anything. The manager requested they make a purchase or leave. They refused.
Police were called on the grounds that the men were, therefore, trespassing. Police repeatedly asked the men to leave, but were rebuffed (according to the police commissioner). The two men were arrested.
You can legitimately argue that the manager was overzealous, and made a series of bad business decisions. But if fairness and responsibility have any merit left in our society, you absolutely, positively cannot cry “racism,” since there is zero evidence to support that claim. But that is exactly what happened.
Starbucks’ CEO Kevin Johnson and Jim Kenney, mayor of Philadelphia (ironically, a city known as the “cradle of liberty”), pulled race out of thin air and injected it anyway. In the truest form of bullying, they proceeded to call the manager a racist in front of the entire planet, despite admitting that they were lacking in pertinent facts, and had no evidence for such an incendiary claim.
Many have stated that this would not have happened to a white person. Wrong verb. It already has, many times. Numerous readers, identifying themselves as white, detailed their experience of ducking into a city Starbucks to use the restroom, only to be told that those facilities were reserved for paying customers.
Police Commissioner Richard Ross is no Frank Reagan. The “Blue Bloods” character would have defended his officers for doing their job, as Ross initially did. But then Ross completely caved to Mayor Kenney and his social engineering agenda, falling on his sword by taking “responsibility” for “failing miserably” in a pathetic mea culpa. He then ran the bus over the arresting officer by describing him as “mortified.”
Ross has no guts (resulting in a morale hit among officers), but also no political acumen. There isn’t a chance Kenney would have fired Ross had the commissioner stuck by his guns. None.
Has anyone bothered to ask if the manager thought the nonpaying people could have been undercover corporate auditors, verifying adherence to company policies? Were the men in question inappropriate toward her?
Had non-paying vagrants used the bathrooms in the past to bathe themselves or shoot up? Was she trying to preserve seat space for paying customers? Were people who had not purchased anything but given bathroom access granted such permission by the same manager – or a different one?
There are myriad questions that deserve answers, but sadly, that will never happen because of the rush to judgment.
The destruction of livelihoods, families, reputations, and hopes, solely on the basis of assumptions – facts be damned – is the territory of banana republics. We are better than that, and so must rise above personal feelings and hearsay, resisting the urge to condemn before facts are known. Otherwise, America’s “rights” will soon have nothing unique about them.
And that will be the most bitter brew of all.