Four years ago, a horrific incident at a far-right rally in Charlottesville, VA left one person dead and nineteen injured. In August of 2017, Heather Heyer, an anti-racist protester, was killed by the car driven by James Alex Fields while she was demonstrating against a “Unite the Right” rally to protest the removal of Confederate statues. Mr. Fields was a self-described neo-Nazi and White supremacist.
The Reverend Al Sharpton and his National Action Network sidekicks were promptly on the scene to lead a National movement to call attention to the atrocity that had occurred. Last week another group of marchers and attendees were run down on the street. This time in Waukesha, WI. and, to date, six have died and another sixty have been hospitalized. Four of the five victims who were killed, after a red SUV plowed into a Christmas parade, were members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies club and an eight year old boy died in the hospital soon after.
The two tragedies are eerily similar … but I’ve heard no mention of prospective travel plans to Wisconsin by Mr. Sharpton. The slaughter of six innocents in the Nation’s heartland came at the hand of a career criminal with multiple priors. 39-year-old Darrell Brooks, Jr. has a record of resisting arrest, obstruction, assault, battery, statutory sexual enticement, strangulation and suffocation, destruction of property, illegal possession of firearms, bail jumping, domestic violence, drug related charges and is a registered sex offender. As he was crashing his vehicle through the crowd, he was out of jail on a politically motivated, and unrealistically low, $1,000 bail.
Just last week, a federal jury in Virginia awarded more than $25 million in damages to plaintiffs in a lawsuit against James Fields and the organizers and participants in the 2017 Unite the Right white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. The decision from the jury “sent a clear message: violent hate won’t go unanswered,” said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of the group, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, supporting the plaintiffs in the case.
None of these litigants have shown any interest in holding Derrell Brooks, or his enablers, accountable. One can only assume that the slaughter of four grandmothers, a bystander, and a small child in Wisconsin pales into insignificance, at least in the Reverend Sharpton’s estimation, when compared to the death of a single woman in Virginia when certain criteria come into play. Could it have anything to do with skin color?
profile: definition ....
meaning: 1. a short description of someone's life, work, character, and information about the person's interests and beliefs.
meaning: 2. an outline of that same person's face as it is seen when someone is looking at them from the side. If you see someone in profile, you only see them from one side.
From these two definitions I can only conclude one thing: profiles as such and offered by job seekers, politicians, and aspiring writers, risk falling into very obvious categorical traps ..... they will be hopelessly self-edifying and boldly "two faced"!
To avoid these pitfalls I intend to state an illusion and immediately counter it with the fact. If the latter is too candid or disturbing, just disregard it! This will allow me to come off (in your estimation) as the fine upstanding, clean cut, like-minded, and adventurous elderly gentleman you were hoping for.
Illusion: I'm an accomplished "sailor" and have spent over 50 years routinely putting out to sea, first under canvas and in my latter years with only the diesel iron wind at my back.
Fact: In all of my voyages I've never spent more than eight or nine full nights underway and that was only because, over open water, Walker's Cay was too far from Palm City or Havana from Key West. In reality, as the sun begins to set I'm usually tucked into some snug little cove, the hook set, and an icy drink in my hand. I'm not an accomplished sailor, I'm a fantastic "anchorer"!
Illusion: I'm a semi-talented "writer" that creates interesting characters in situations and settings that, sometimes, move a story along.
Fact: In most cases, I am the "character" and I've already lived the story. Then all I need to do is figure out how to just pretend I'm sitting in some sleazy dive in the Keys after a few beers and start to tell my story to ........ (only problem is: .......... is it “i” before “e” except at sea?)
Illusion: Because I am openly conservative and speak with a Southern drawl, I'm looked upon as a right-wing good-ole-boy that picnics under Confederate monuments, lives and breathes Fox News, drives a gun-racked Ford 150, and wears his "Make America Great Again" hat to bed every night.
Fact: I'm very discouraged with what is going on in Washington in general and at the White House in particular. I supported its current occupant and, seeing what options are shaping up on the horizon, I may be forced to continue doing so but he(and we) could do so much better. Do I have to surrender my judgment and intellect to remain a Republican?
I won't dwell on the President's Smoot-Hawley like policies on trade and tariffs ... time and the markets will be the final arbiters and greed on my part forces me to hope for the best. Needless to say, I endorse his impact on the Judicial Branch of Government and I could care less what next week's "horndog rumor" and accompanying hush-money payoff have in store .... I'll leave that to his poor wife and "Morning Joe"! But I do have one pet peeve: we don't need a $5,000,000,000.00 wall to keep out Guatemalans and their Central American neighbors. They only constitute the latest installment in 4 centuries of migration to our shores and may be the hardest working bunch yet assembled. The hardships they are fleeing are not unlike the pogroms against Jews in the Middle East or the 19th century Irish potato famine. The seemingly demeaning statement of: "how would the roof ever get patched or the grass cut without them?" or a variation thereof has been directed at virtually every American's fore-bearers. Unless you stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock or the swampy landing at Jamestown, there was always somebody "better than you" waiting to curse your arrival ……… or put you in chains.
On the flip side of all of this, and without inserting its own Illusion, we don't need porn starlets and their attorneys being featured on Sunday morning talk shows answering pointed questions from wax haired "contributors" about our Presidents libido! What we do desperately need is a media culture that will demand the resurrection and employment of an old concept ...... news REPORTING! On my home cable TV hookup; Fox News is on channel 44 and MSNBC resides on 42. The Guide tells me that the channel between them ...43 ... is dedicated to financial news but that can't be true. The call letters may be CNBC but, judging from the disparity in the adjacent editorializing, it must be Star Wars! ..... the distance between the adjoining galaxies is so "far, far, away"?
Over the past few months I've become a reluctant, almost incarcerated, soccer fan. The game is played, not with a pitch .... but on one, lasts an hour and a half, and often ends with a score of nil-nil. I endure all this because my sole source of, even remotely, unbiased television news and happenings in the good old USA can be found only on the British Broadcasting Corp ..... go Cardiff City!
Jim Powell
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2 thoughts on “WHERE IS THE REVEREND?”
Al Sharpton only shows up at events that provide him with a “‘photo op opportunity.” He does nothing constructive and promotes nothing but racial discord. He and Jackson don’t deserve the title Reverend.
Because I can’t ask him, I’m going to assume that Al Sharpton was unhappy about the mass murder in the Waukesha atrocity not just because of the tragic deaths of so many, but obviously because the perpetrator was a man of color. Of course the reverend’s silence in this case had to do with color. And of course his efforts to call attention to the Charlottesville death—even though the dead person, Heather Heyer, was white. You weren’t really asking a question, were you? It was your opportunity to highlight the fact that things aren’t fair any more in your little world. Poor Jim. Too many black faces on T.V. Check. A higher percentage of mixed race couples in the media than is representative of ‘real life’. Check. This changing life isn’t fair for a white boy anymore, is it? I’m not about to defend—or condemn—Rev. Sharpton. I’d just like to remind you that it hasn’t been that long since a crime committed against a person of color wasn’t even a crime. Public lynchings were a thing as recently as 1950. Many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators, including elected officials and prominent citizens for bumping in a white person or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. Who was there to protest that? There have been so many injustices against Blacks at the hands of Caucasians—many, if not most of them unpunished, and I’m not going all the way back to slavery, but I could. Give me a freaking break, Powell. So what? You have way too much time on your hands if you are going to nit-pick Al Sharpton’s responses to hate crimes and use a tragedy of such proportions to call out an activist for Blacks. Derrell Brooks Jr. is batshit crazy in addition to being … sort of black. Sharpton sounds off when ‘his people’ are demonized. People protect their tribe. For better or worse, that’s the way we’re wired—you, too, apparently.
Jim Powell along with his family, friends, and classmates 
Al Sharpton only shows up at events that provide him with a “‘photo op opportunity.” He does nothing constructive and promotes nothing but racial discord. He and Jackson don’t deserve the title Reverend.
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Because I can’t ask him, I’m going to assume that Al Sharpton was unhappy about the mass murder in the Waukesha atrocity not just because of the tragic deaths of so many, but obviously because the perpetrator was a man of color. Of course the reverend’s silence in this case had to do with color. And of course his efforts to call attention to the Charlottesville death—even though the dead person, Heather Heyer, was white. You weren’t really asking a question, were you? It was your opportunity to highlight the fact that things aren’t fair any more in your little world. Poor Jim. Too many black faces on T.V. Check. A higher percentage of mixed race couples in the media than is representative of ‘real life’. Check. This changing life isn’t fair for a white boy anymore, is it? I’m not about to defend—or condemn—Rev. Sharpton. I’d just like to remind you that it hasn’t been that long since a crime committed against a person of color wasn’t even a crime. Public lynchings were a thing as recently as 1950. Many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators, including elected officials and prominent citizens for bumping in a white person or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. Who was there to protest that? There have been so many injustices against Blacks at the hands of Caucasians—many, if not most of them unpunished, and I’m not going all the way back to slavery, but I could. Give me a freaking break, Powell. So what? You have way too much time on your hands if you are going to nit-pick Al Sharpton’s responses to hate crimes and use a tragedy of such proportions to call out an activist for Blacks. Derrell Brooks Jr. is batshit crazy in addition to being … sort of black. Sharpton sounds off when ‘his people’ are demonized. People protect their tribe. For better or worse, that’s the way we’re wired—you, too, apparently.
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