Organizers and Media playing a Large Role in Protesting and Shootings

You may believe that it is not your fault if a police officer, regardless of color, shoots and kills another person, regardless of color but then you would be wrong.  Every decision we make will affect others either directly or indirectly and those decisions that we make are ours be responsible for. 

Organizers of protests stand responsible for not making sure that those joining their ranks are peaceful or just looking to blend into the crowd and create trouble.  They are responsible for making sure that a peaceful protest be just that and those involved remain peaceful.  You cannot claim to be representing anyone if you fail to properly represent them.  The biggest division between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was that King wished for and demanded non-violence while Malcolm was tired of being pushed around and wanted to push back.   Anyone with any sense of history can clearly tell which movement actually achieved its goal and which one was merely looked upon as just a group of angry folks.  This same thing is happening to protesting groups today.  Organizers spread the word to be at a particular place at a particular time but they do nothing about ensuring that none of those who show up there will go home safe and sound at the end.  Even going as far as frisking everyone to make sure no one has a weapon of any kind on them real or fake.  Even going as far as making sure that no one provokes any cops that they meet on the way.  Even going as far as making sure that the group is speaking in one voice with one leader/spokesperson and if anyone within the group violates even the slightest of these rules, they are publicly evicted from that group immediately.  It is time for organizers to take responsibility for the decisions that they make.  You want 100 people to show up at your rallies, you are then responsible for those 100 lives period.  You hide behind you inability to be responsible for the actions of another, then why are you holding all police officers responsible for the actions of another?

Media has a major role to play within these protests as well.  The way you report things will determine the individual’s initial mind-set about the subject.  If all you concentrate on is the color of the players in your story skin, then that is all your readers are going to read.  You should be more professional than that.  You are talking about a person’s life and the taking of it.  This should not be something that you report about like it is an everyday occurrence.  It should be hard to report the death of a fellow American, a fellow citizen, a fellow human being but it appears that media is getting so use to this and that is scary.  It appears that media is so quick to put race front and center of their articles not because you need it to identify the people in the article but that it incites a more viral reactions and may get more people to read what you write.  I imagine this will only happen when the media finally gets that all lives matter and is much more important than page views or ratings.  Media says that business puts profit before people, yet forgets that they are also a business and falls directly within that same talking point.

If the report of a recent shooting in Berkeley, Missouri can be believed and 18 year old Antonio Martin did point a weapon at Sgt. Brian Schellman then this conversation needs to end there.  If the mother of Martin was also there then she needs to take responsibility for her son having a weapon, if what is reported can be believed but ultimately it is up to those conducting the investigation and we can only hope they are led by the evidence and not by personal gain.