The Real Victims

I have to give the rioters and looters of Baltimore some credit, they did manage to elicit some sympathy from me during their rampage last night.  Oh, I don't feel sorry for them--portraying themselves as "oppressed people acting out in the only way they can".  They are common thugs and thieves hiding beneath the veil of "racial disparity" to somehow justify their lawless behavior.

No, I feel sorry for the African-Americans who worked at the businesses the looters robbed and the rioters burned down.  Those people were trying to make their way the right way.  Some may have even owned the businesses--providing economic hope for others in their community--but yesterday, that was all taken away...in the name of "justice".

And I feel sorry for the elderly African-American folks who got their Medicare Part D prescriptions filled at the CVS Pharmacy that was first stripped of all its drugs--and then set fire to--likely to destroy any evidence of who had been in there.  They probably went to that store because it was close to home or it was on the bus line.  Now they will have to go miles--a difficult trip for them perhaps--to get their pills.  And let's not forget the young Black women getting their free birth control pills through the Affordable Care Act who will likely have to deal with the same men who burned down their drug store insisting they can't wear a condom (even though I'm sure that section was cleaned out immediately after the opiates, narcotics and liquor were).  Do you think CVS is going to rebuild in that neighborhood?  Do you think Rite-Aid or Walgreens saw what happened and are thinking "Hey, this looks like a market opening for us!"  Another vital community service taken away in the name of "effecting social change".

I even felt sorry for the so-called "Community Leaders" and "organizers" who were out there trying to stop the very people they are hoping to build up from destroying what little they had.  CNN showed one guy in a suit initially trying to hold people back--but then getting shoved to the ground by the mob as they moved on.  It must have come as a shock to that guy find out that the "hope and change" that he thought he was building in his community was nothing but a myth.

And as I watched the riot make its way through the streets of the city, I had to wonder why the mob never descends upon the drug houses and burns them down? And why the gangbangers' hangouts aren't looted and robbed of their "ill-gotten goods"?  Why not target the people who take what limited resources these communities of color have and "redistribute" them to Mexican drug cartels and weapons traffickers in other metropolitan locations--  and who replace those resources with suffering and crime and death and misery?  It's probably because those involved in the very activities that destroy Black neighborhoods in every city across this country were the ones out there on the streets mugging for the cameras and blaming the police and politicians and "the whites" for "keeping them down".