Seen On Facebook
Seen by Glenn Reynolds.
I was watching Monday Night Football when they were playing promos for Hulu. I heard a line of dialog come over the speaker; I wasn’t actually looking at the screen at that moment, but I heard the dialog and was appalled.
“You know why America loves a crime story? Because America is a crime story.”
No. America, for all her many imperfections, is not a crime story.
And it is a deep wrong for wealthy and powerful people to transmit such an awful message to our countrymen. Want to know why we’re in so much trouble? Because we’ve produced a national elite who cheerfully broadcast such rubbish, and spit on the achievements of those who’ve gone before us.
I remember Medgar Evers. He was a veteran who served his country, came home, and wasn’t allowed to vote. So in his spare time, when he wasn’t at work selling insurance, he served as Mississippi field secretary of the NAACP, and registered black people to vote.
And he was shot in the back at his own front door by a white man, in an act of damnable cowardice. Now that’s a crime story.
But Evers was buried at Arlington, with full military honors. Within two years, the voting rights he demanded were protected by federal law. And 31 years after Evers was killed, the man who did it was convicted of murder and would die in prison.
Because I don’t live in a crime story. I live in the United States of America.