Over and over again, we get these wake-up calls. Over and over again, America listens for a little while, and then goes back to its usual state of willful ignorance. Rinse and repeat. STUPID.
Its not like we havent seen this before: people are oppressed for so long and in so many ways, they cant take it any more and lash out in blind rage. Baltimore today, Ferguson yesterday, and running back through history: Watts, Little Rock, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, all the way back to ancient Rome and its predecessors. An insular ruling class oppresses the masses, and eventually the masses revolt.
And there are always those who TELL the ruling class what is going on, pleading with them, exhorting them to change the arc of history, to learn from history, to not repeat the mistakes of history. So it was, and so it is. For example, here are the words of Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos:
That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one nights property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US to third-world dictatorships, like China and others; plunged tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every Americans civil-rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.
Pretty clear, isnt he? America can (and should) listen to him, wake up and take action. But no, America will probably just roll over, smack the s*** out of the snooze button on the alarm, and go back to sleep. Eventually, the wake-up call will be so loud, it cant be ignored any longer.
By then, itll be too late. America will finally wake up, only to find out that it died in its sleep.