I don’t know which is more frightening — a couple of good old boys suggesting that police shoot people who commit property crimes and then leave their bodies in the street in a pool of blood for the media’s profit and the entertainment of the rest of us, or someone who says we shouldn’t worry about them because they’re just good old boys with too much time on their hands.
Many of us in Fayette County are insulated from many of the reasons people protested in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. That does not in any way justify our attributing to them motivation of which we cannot possibly know. We should be able to discuss the situation without condoning destruction of others’ property and injury to others, but even more important, without espousing murder.
My respect for Mr. Garlock — as a veteran and writer — evaporated with the first letter, and went deep into negative territory with his second. Turning this into a question of Democrat vs. Republican politics appears to me an attempt to redefine the argument and draw attention from his shocking proposals. Most folks who served in the military encountered the expression, “smoke and mirrors.” I think it applies to his second letter.
Should Mr. Presberg have signed his letter as leader of the Fayette County Democrats? Yes. He has earned his bully pulpit and has not only the right, but also the obligation to use it.
Some 240 years after The Enlightenment, the barbarians are at the gates. They’re not young, black, and poor. They seem largely to be white and male; rednecks in overalls, business suits, pseudo-military cammies, and white sheets. They are so blinded by their prejudices they couldn’t see Truth if it stood before them.
Everyone deserves to be heard. Those who do not have the privilege of publication may have to take to the streets.
I write this in part to illustrate the point that we are animals. We are naked apes living on a ball of rock which we are trying to destroy by uncontrolled breeding, by greed, by indolence leading to the seizure of our government by the few, by protecting and respecting any sort of nonsense that calls itself a religion, and by chanting “Taxed Enough Already” and thereby ensuring that the plutocrats who own the government will get even richer and be able to buy more congresspersons, state legislators, governors, and, probably, the next president.
Shakespeare wrote, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
And many people have heard that. But who remembers the next line: “And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me …”
Paul Lentz
Peachtree City, Ga.
