Two men were killed last week in what have been described as senseless murders. First point to be made: all murders are committed without sense, in that they are violations of the moral code God has inscribed on our hearts. We call some of them senseless because we can’t connect the act to some rationale, however invalid. In both of these cases, the victims were unknown to their assailants and had done nothing to warrant any type of reprisal.
Christopher Lane was a college student in Oklahoma, a native Australian who was in the United States on a baseball scholarship. He was jogging, bothering no one, when a car pulled up behind him and shots were fired. He died almost immediately, according to those who arrived on the scene to try to minister aid to him.
The three youths arrested for the act were all black—perhaps one was mixed-race—and reports are that they did this a) because they were bored; b) for the fun of it; or c) as part of a wannabe-gang ritual. According to the authorities, one of the youths, after being arrested, danced around and laughed about it, apparently enjoying his notoriety. This same young man, aged 15, had commented on Twitter that he hated whites.
The other victim was 88-year-old Delbert Belton, of Washington state, who was simply sitting in his car when two youths came up to him and beat him to death with flashlights. Belton was a WWII veteran who had been injured in the Battle of Okinawa. Again, the culprits, as caught on surveillance cameras, were black.
Now, in neither of these murders did anyone say they were doing this as payback for Trayvon Martin. No, there’s probably no such connection. And when you compare the three separate incidents, you see a clear distinction. In the Martin-Zimmerman case, there were mitigating circumstances that had to be sorted out. In the latter two, there are none. Neither Lane nor Belton had done anything at all to warrant an attack.
So are these racial incidents? Are they fueled by racism? Well, at least one of the youths who killed Lane, as I’ve already noted, is on the public record as being racially motivated, even though the prosecutors in the case seem reluctant to press that issue. Is that where we’ve come to as a nation? Are we not allowed to apply racism equally across the board, wherever it may appear? And when is President Obama going to insert himself into this? He certainly wasn’t reluctant when Trayvon Martin was the one who died.
And of course there are his willing accomplices in the media who are prone to look the other way:
Is this the new, improved version of separate-but-equal?
Both Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have boldly declared that the nation needs to have a conversation on race. We’ve heard that repeatedly throughout this administration. It’s getting rather old by now:
I’m not opposed to that conversation. I believe all races stand equally before God, since He is the One who created this diversity in the first place. It’s just that a conversation has to go two ways, or it won’t be a conversation at all. I don’t think the president wants to invest himself in the current conversation because it’s not going the way he intended. The conversation he seeks is one-sided, whereas we need to cover all topics: racism no matter what the source; broken families; slanted and deficient education; a welfare state that creates a sense of entitlement. We need to talk about the American character and what has happened to it. We need to discuss the loss of Biblical absolutes in our society and the consequences.
Would he be open to that conversation?