President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected the notion that this week’s stunning violence is a signal that the U.S. has returned to some of the darkest days of its past, saying that as painful as the killings of police and black men were, “America is not as divided as some have suggested”
THE NEW YORK POST printed before the 5th officer perished.. but their cover this morning will be blazing through the early streets of New York City and beyond .. they are calling it a “civil war” and showcasing images of dead police officers next to their squad cars..
Those who slept peacefully through the night and are waking up to news this morning are going to have their souls rocked..
I woke up around 230am as my phone kept buzzing with breaking news events.. I tried to ignore at first until I realized just what those breaking news alerts were saying…
My mind turned into panic about the country.. Obviously I could not fall back to sleep and become glued to news coverage of the Dallas carnage.. I even turned on Coast to Coast AM and listened to George Noory take calls and try to get a mental handle no the mess that is occurring right now..
“I didn’t see anybody else get shot, just the cops. I saw cops getting shot, right there in plain sight. While we was running, like, they just kept shooting,“ Washington said. "We didn’t know where it was coming from”
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These are the words of
Cortney Washington to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth in the chaos after the Dallas police carnage ..
The shootings occurred as Americans nationwide took to the streets to demand answers over the killings of two black men in two days. They wept, marched and chanted “Black Lives Matter."Crowds gathered outside Gov. Mark Dayton’s residence in St. Paul, Minnesota, miles from the spot where an officer killed Philando Castile in a car on Wednesday.
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Gunshots rang out Thursday night during demonstrations against the shooting deaths of two African-American men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
A total of 11 officers were shot, Dallas police said. A standoff is underway as authorities try to negotiate with a suspect in a downtown garage.It was the deadliest single attack on law enforcement since the 2001 terror attacks, when 72 officers died, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
A total of 10 police officers were shot by snipers during the protests, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said. An 11th officer was shot during an exchange of gunfire with one of the suspects, authorities said.
It is unclear at this time how many snipers were actually involved .. no motive has been released..
If you were in Washington DC last night (or many other East Coast cities) you hardly saw the July 4th fireworks shows. It was cloudy, murky, ugly, and rainy as a storm zipped by the major metros just in time for dusk fire shows..
If you watched PBS’ version, you saw something very different: Other fireworks shows from curiously clear skies.
Perhaps it’s only in D.C. where a PBS show can become a scandal.. But it did just that. Even forcing PBS so say sorry..
In the old days before the Internet people may not have questioned this. In the new era where information runs wild, it become an instant obsession of Twitter and social media.
PBS defended itself first, Tweeting:
We showed a combination of the best fireworks from this year and previous years. It was the patriotic thing to do.
When they realized they sounded like Twits they apologized over the social media airwaves for “for any confusion this may have caused”..
The fourth of July upon us.. the fireworks, the nostalgia.. the pride. I have always had mixed emotions no this holiday– more so than any other one as a matter of fact. It’s the birthday of American independence, it’s the festival of a nation united in common causes.. It sure took a long time for some of us to become more in common than others.. We have been through pain and tribulation as a country.
And we will again.
The ending of the WONDER YEARS from 1993 (yes, that long ago) was the same mixture of nostalgia and pain that Americans so often feel as they glare at the bombs bursting in air above their towns every year.. Kevin Arnold didn’t marry Winnie. And his dad had a heart attack. And things didn’t really go the way people thought they would .. or could.
Possibilities often dashed but somehow it all works it.
America has the same feeling sometimes.. The same coupling of pain and laughter, sorry and joy. All at once as well…
And that is just life. American life. Fourth of July 2016.
