A week ago, July 5th and July 6th, two "armed" black men were shot and killed by police during routine police work. It was not the case, as reports confirm, that either black man was physically handing a gun - simply that each man was in possession of it. The videos of both shootings aren't simply "troubling" as the buzz-word news would have you believe; they touch your human soul on a sickening level; a level of alien horror; a level of viciousness; a level of vulnerability; a level of deep human sadness.
Listen to the first 2 minutes of the Philando Castile video. Listen to the terror - I mean gut wrenching sadness and terror - in the police officer's voice. Listen to Philando's pitiful last breaths, his weak calls, his final moments on Earth with his daughter behind him. A man's life snuffed out on National television; shot like an animal. Murdered. That, of course, was only one day after Alton Sterling was gunned down in a parking lot, and only two days before Dallas police were targeted in a form of retaliation.
Yesterday, on Bastille Day in Nice, France, a huge crowd was enjoying a parade. An insane Tunisian man drove around the block in his huge freezer truck, turned around and drove into the crowd, mowing over parents, children and babies; these little things wrapped under the wheels and tossed into the street as raw meat. More than 80 people died.
And today, in the troubled nation of Turkey, citizens quite suddenly have found themselves in the middle of a violent coup; a faction of the military having taken senior leaders hostage this morning (US time).
I know many people have already decried the evident mindlessness exhibited by the new Pokemon Go craze, which was released July 6th; having taken to the web to voice their tepid concern. I'm not going to be one of them. Honestly, I enjoy many things that probably aren't valuable to the average American; I hold judgement on this fad.
Yet with the sounds of Philando and Alton gasping for their final breaths still ringing in my ears, and with the videos of Dallas policemen being buried, and with the shots of young Turkish soldiers looking terrified and fierce, fighting for some solvency in their home, and with those lurid photos in Nice, France, where children are splayed out under sheets, crushed across the pavement with tiny dolls in their outstretched and cold fingers...
Jesus Christ, can't we gain some perspective?