Deep breath. Guilty on all counts. A victory? No, but anything less would have been a great defeat and in this world at this time we need whatever we can get. I will not live to see it, but the next 20 or 30 years in this country are going to be very, very difficult. Military men and women have joined the right wing militia groups and the right wing militia groups have infiltrated the military. White anxiety is growing apace and voter suppression threatens to undermine the progressive tendencies of demographic change. Can we once and for all time put to rest the myth of American exceptionalism?
There were many flaws in the draft, and Viet Nam brought them out, but there’s a price to be paid for abolishing it. We’ve created a separate caste of professional warriors—not citizen soldiers. That didn’t work well for Rome and it isn’t likely to work well for us. Similarly, with the police: those who today self-select for the military or law enforcement include, I fear, a disproportionately large group of autocrats who see violence administered by themselves as the solution to all problems, real and imagined.
ReplyDeleteSurely it's an overstatement to say that anything else than guilty on all counts would have been a great defeat - the charge of second degree murder was a difficult one to prove, and if anything it speaks to the good job the prosecution did in making the case for it, but a guilty verdict on third degree murder and manslaughter would not have been an entirely bad outcome.
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