Lack of vision obvious

I grew up in the 1960s amid protests against the war in Vietnam, discrimination between the sexes and racial inequality. My father was a member of the 101st Airborne Division dispatched to the integration of Central High School. He was shocked by the behavior of the citizens of Little Rock.

The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King are both clear in my memory. I truly never thought those days would be evident again. I was wrong. We are witnessing a rehashing of those same events today, in 2020. Ironic that the same concept used for perfect vision has manifested itself in a year where lack of vision is so frighteningly obvious.

Protest for the murder of black men by police is warranted and guaranteed protection by constitutional amendment yet is acted upon as a crime with arrest of peaceful citizens as well as people of the press. Sounds like the actions of a dictator-led country.

Our president, in reference to a 75-year-old man being pushed to the ground by police and sustaining life-threatening injury, tweets “setup” and “falling harder than he was pushed” with literally no basis. Clearly our president has no concept of the acceleration due to gravity: 9.8m/ sec/sec. Calculated, that means the 75-year-old man’s head hit the ground at about 15 miles per hour presuming he was 6 feet tall.

Many contribute arguments of black-on-black crime and the disproportionate number of abortions in the black community as some perverse defense. That is all meaningless as regards a homicidal death of any person of any color or race secondary to misconduct of police or any other manner of homicide. Any argument fails when the death is unjustified.

When do we as morally guided people return to a moral way of life? Looking out for one another regardless of race, color, religion or any other descriptor. We are a race, a human race that shares one very common ancestry of humanity. Until we shrug off the differences, we will continue to fail as a society.

CHRIS BAKER Little Rock