he doesn't mean to. The more the loudmouthed extremists parade their ugliness, the more we will see reasonable but distracted and unaware citizens sit up and pay attention. Whenever we warn that the country is moving inexorably toward police state fascism, someone jumps in to insist that we are being a bunch of silly Chicken Littles, even after someone posts the familiar excerpt from They Thought They Were Free.
But when people who normally don't pay attention to abuses that don't directly affect them are forced to see videos of police abusing and killing innocent, unarmed black men and children, they cannot easily escape the epiphany those videos produce. And when loudmouthed racist jerks like Lynch et al. start spouting their vicious BS, the reasonably decent folks who have held on to their comfortable illusions are forced to see that the racism and general abusiveness is pervasive and espoused at the highest levels of police culture.
As horrifying as it was that cops like Bull Connor and his gang of uniformed KKKers used dogs, horses, and fire hoses to viciously attack peaceful marchers (including small children and frail oldsters, all dressed in their Sunday best and behaving politely and properly), when the film of those attacks was shown on the national news programs, people in other parts of the country finally understood what life was like for innocent black people in the South.
Yes, racism was pervasive all across the US then, as it is now, but the extraordinary, unprovoked brutality people witnessed in those film clips changed quite a few hearts and minds and did a lot to validate the claims of the Civil Rights marchers in the minds of those who had previously wanted to believe it was much ado about nothing, or that any violence was the fault of radical "outside agitators."
I am glad that a**hats like Lynch and the cops who turned their backs at the funeral are waving their racism so blatantly, because it is harder to expose racism and abusiveness when they hide behind polite and reasonable-seeming masks.
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