Purple bandaids, "Let him die" and violent killer cops.

The slew of violent, criminal police behavior we`ve seen lately has made me think about how these men and women sworn to "serve and protect" have gone so far astray. To my way of thinking, the problem is deeper than racism and/or poor training. It`s us, .... we the people. The same people who wore purple bandaids to mock John Kerry`s war wounds. The part of the crowd that yelled, "Let him die" when a hypothetical question was asked about a young man in a coma with no health insurance. The people that cheer at dogfights or shoot a seven year old on her way to school because they`re pissed off because her uncle owed them money. The people who can build pyramids out of naked men with chains around their necks and then pose, smiling, with a corpse. The people, like Rush Limbaugh, who joke about hungry children or the people who`d drag a gay man behind their pickup truck for the hell of it. There are plenty more examples where these came from, and we`ve heard them over and over and over. Look at the horrible examples of bullying in our schools and on the internet. Bulling because a teenage girl isn`t a size 4 or because a teenage boy "acts gay" whatever that means. Look at the examples of road rage, fraternity hazing, rape.

We have become so lacking in empathy, so coarse, that we need almost no reason to think a suspect "deserved it", deserved getting shot in the back because he ran from police. Homeless people "deserve it" because they probably want to live on the streets anyway. "Deserved it" because a black teenager on the 19th floor of a project got gunned down because he wasn`t in school where he should have been. "Deserved it" because a young woman was asking for it, asking to be raped, because she wore a short skirt.

We`ve thrown our language around in such a callous way that "haters" here at DU apparently are people who disagree with a particular candidate`s position. Really? Haters? I thought haters were people like those I described in the first paragraph. Those are the people we should be trying to do something about. We should save our tough language for loud-and-clear demands for a change to our country`s current atmosphere of real hate, exemplified by the recent noose around neck of the statue of James Meredith, the University of Mississippi`s first black student.

There are some wonderful, caring people in this country and they need to band together, however imperfect a union, and demand a stop to this in-your-face hatred that is chipping away at everything. We are so much better than that.