Commentary

Help Spread Words That Heal

by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, June 3, 2020

I have very few words left.

The last four months have bled my mind dry. I now long for the days when I would wake up, look at the news and worry only about the toll the pandemic was taking on the world. I did not enjoy those stories, but I knew that science would prevail at some point and we would solve that problem. We may be inconvenienced for a while, maybe a year or two, but it will get better.

Now I wake up and read news that's so much worse. People are dying because of reasons that should not be. The pain is all compounding and it simply is too much.

I have to explain to my kids what is going on -- and doing so creates fear that shouldn’t have to be there. I had to help them understand there are far too many people in the world who have to tread lightly because they are afraid every day that someone may hurt them for no reason other than the color of their skin. If you thought the human psyche was holding on by a fragile thread of sanity before the last week, that thread has snapped. It is gone.

The worst thing about the last few weeks is that our leadership shows no compassion, nor decency. Our leadership is simply, in a word, absent.

I'm not just talking about the President. I am talking about Congress and all the “leaders” we see in government. I’m talking about all of the federal government and their inability to lead through difficult times.

I am also speaking about the media and its desire to further flame the fires of hate and division. The news networks have a responsibility to share information and to help guide the national consciousness, but they are unable to do so because we live in a media environment driven more by social media than the evening news. There is no Walter Cronkite. Instead, there is Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter may be finally taking a stand, but Facebook is not. I think they should.

The media can help to spread rational thought and stoke the symbols of hope. I was fortunate enough to hear people like Ford Foundation President Darren Walker speak multiple times this past week, offering words that everyone should hear. I heard Killer Mike from Run The Jewels speak, and his words were resonant.

These people have the words that can help heal, and the media needs to spread them.

The media has to help when our leaders won’t, spreading the words of intelligent, compassionate, empathetic people who can help heal our minds and communities.

I have very few words left, but the words I have should be used to help.

I hope they do.

9 comments about "Help Spread Words That Heal".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Ken Kurtz from creative license, June 3, 2020 at 2:38 p.m.
Your poor children. Being fed lies by dear old dad.

Enough with the nonsense about people having to "tread lightly." Every study done to date on racial bias in law enforcement is clear. No bias. So stop with the nonsense that minorities are inordinately being shot and killed by cops because of the color of their skin. All because of inflammatory videos that go viral. It's flat-out false, there exists no data to support it.

If you look at actual data, including perhaps the quintessential study on the topic done by Harvard African American economist Roland Fryer...

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/good-policing-saves-black-lives

... you'll be able to tell your children the truth. That it is criminality that they should "tread lightly" around. As in... "DON'T BE A CRIMINAL, young Treffiletti children of mine."

I find irony in the fact that Minneapolis's current African-American Chief of Police was hired after his predecessor left over minimal blowback from an African-American Minneapolis police officer shooting and killing a white woman back in 2017 (she called police to report a sexual assault, and wound up shot in the stomach)...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/07/ex-minneapolis-cop-sentenced-12-5-years-murder-unarmed-woman/1382798001/

No rioting, looting, mayhem, or murder after that police mishap three years ago. It just didn't fit the prevailing American false narrative, did it?

Read the Harvard study, and the Michigan State, and University of Maryland studies that confirm it, and its data. NO BIAS.

As a white man that has been battered by law enforcement twice in my life (both times while young, intoxicated, and engaged in criminal behavior, the second time so brutally that it was a bit touch and go) I can assure you that no punches were pulled, or batons left out of the mix because I wasn't a minority.

We do have a police problem. Law enforcement has always been too low-paying, too dangerous, and too thankless. As such it has never attracted our "best, and brightest." Rather, the work has always tended to draw from a universe of Americans that are less intelligent, more power hungry and unfortunately, more Napoleonic complex.

Let's address the real problem, and drop the fake one that is causing so much additional death, and mayhem right now. The truth is always the best starting point. And it is unequivocally true that 13% of America's population is committing 80% of all of America's violent crime (including 50% af all murders in America). That 13% is our African-American population. You want to discuss "equality?" Start there.
Reply

Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, June 3, 2020 at 11:45 p.m.

There is the ability to delete such comments but then again, MP has its own internal strife.

Michael Giuseffi from American Media Inc replied, June 5, 2020 at 2:02 p.m.

Ken Kurtz- your comments would fit right in at any Fascist meeting. Your study source The Manhattan Institute is a right wing think tank that has been on the wrong side of history for years. Board members include Charles Murray (of the notorious The Bell Curve), Noted theocrat, member of "The Family" Tom Coburn (deceased), Frank Leo (Catholic League anti-Choice proponent, Son of Malta etc.) a rogues gallery of right wing wack jobs.

Spew your garbage someplace else.

Ken Kurtz from creative license, June 5, 2020 at 2:48 p.m.

Michael...

I don't know what "The Manhattan Institute" stands for, or represents. I actually read about the Harvard study undertaken by African-American economist Roland Fryer in a WSJ article, but that link had a paywall. The "Manhattan Institute" link I provided instead reprinted the WSJ piece absent that deterrence.

That 2016 study, with its findings that blacks are not more likely to be killed than whites by cops was reinforced by another study by Michigan State University, and a third study by University of Maryland. All three studies are based on actual data points going back many years, NOT the latest and greatest inflammatory video.

I am an Independent that has voted Republican only once in my entire life (1984). Leaving heads stuck in the sand about real data, and truth (and your kneejerk reaction to associating me with fascists) is why we have so little change (and also why there is irrational rioting, looting, murder, and mayhem in our streets right now).

Read the actual studies if you don't like the sources that have picked up, and put the factual findings out there. Those studies that disprove the false narrative that blacks are more likely to die at the hands of cops than whites are available to anybody interested, at the respective university websites.

Or, continue to put all the power of your "believing brain" behind Fakebook videos.

Kenneth Fadner from MediaPost, June 5, 2020 at 4:58 p.m.

Ken Kurtz: Once again you spend a lot of words on your point-of-view assuming that will serve as a substitute for understanding the issue at hand:
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12149468/racism-police-shootings-data

"In other words, Fryer and company found that there weren’t big racial disparities in how often black and white suspects who’d already been stopped by police were killed. But they deliberately avoided the question of whether black citizens are more likely to be stopped to begin with (they are) and whether they’re more likely to be stopped without cause (yup)."

PS: Check the charts in the article from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report which have the correct pertinent data.

Ken Kurtz from creative license, June 5, 2020 at 8:37 p.m.

Good Ken. You're making progress. Based upon true data points, and valid studies by esteemed scientists, and universities, you are conceding that African-Americans are not more likely to be killed by police. Yet here we are, with mobs rallying around that false narrative, and people rioting, looting, committing murder and mayhem based upon that very false narrative. I've heard it 43,000 times this week. Cops have to stop killing blacks, and blacks are in grave danger of being killed by cops, far more grave danger than whites when it simply isn't true. People wonder why there is so little change... perhaps it's because the same false narratives serve as flashpoints over, and over, and over again.

So now you want to pull the old bait and switch. Set up a strawman?

I've never suggested that blacks aren't more likely to be pulled over. But then, there's that terribly inconvenient data point that 13% of America's population (African-American) is committing 80% of all of America's violent crime (including 50% of all of America's murders). Did you fail math, Ken? This is a simple math. There is not a single, solitary reason that African-Americans wouldn't be pulled over more often as crimes are being investigated. To an almost unbelievable degree, they are the suspects. They are doing the crimes.

I hear it now, the crackle of a police car radio, with dispatch reporting that an armed robbery has just gone down in a jewelry store in Chicago, with witnesses reporting a black male fleeing the scene in a red sedan heading west on Mockingbird Lane. And the officer radioing back "10-4 Dispatch. Just two blocks away. We will pull over a couple of white males first just to try to even out the numbers of stops before we pursue the real suspect."

The insanity of the attempts at "false change" that these false narratives stir up leave us with no change, unfortunately. Over, and over again. From decade to decade. Yet there are people right now discussing cops making bogus stops like that to try to "make things look better." Theater of the absurd, produced by leftism. Tickets sold by leftism.

Do the math, Ken. The vast majority of violent crime in America is being committed by blacks, and pulling over more whites, or Asians, or Hispanics would only exist in a terribly ignorant alternative universe that wanted the real culprits to escape. For justice NOT TO BE DONE.

Ken Kurtz from creative license replied, June 5, 2020 at 8:38 p.m.

And the hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter may be the worst of it, when a grand total of ten African-Americans had their lives ended by cops in 2019, and over six thousand African Americans were gunned down, and killed by other African-Americans in that same 365 day period. If African-Americans refuse to abide by "Black Lives Matter," then who should? If African-Americans show by their violent, and deadly actions that black lives don't matter to them, then why should that hypocritical flag fly at all? Why should anybody believe in "Black Lives Matter" when it is so evident that blacks don't?

Ken Kurtz from creative license, June 5, 2020 at 8:45 p.m.

I guess those ten could look more like twenty when the videos just keep getting viewed over and over again, fanning irrational flames, obscuring the truth, the real problems, causing rioting, looting, murders of more blacks, blacks destroying the livelihoods of blacks that have strated businesses, only to see their "bothers, and sisters" burning them down, and destroying everything they worked decades for. This is what you are advocating for, Ken. Just horrific results across the board, and the guarantee that no change will ever occur because people are focused on the wrong things, putting zero effort into treating the real problems in the communities...

Kenneth Fadner from MediaPost, June 6, 2020 at 12:37 a.m.

Ken Kurtz:
Quoting you --
"... a grand total of ten African-Americans had their lives ended by cops in 2019 ..."
Actually, it was more like 260:
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Also, black on black killings are more like 2,500 per year, not the 6,000 you stated. White on white killings are about the same #.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers

You said that African-American's commit "80% of all of America's violent crime ..." The actual percentage is closer to 50:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/tables/table-43