Their Lives Don't Matter

One person was killed - i.e. is now dead - and many more were wounded Sunday night in a series of shootings in St. Louis. Many people and their families are in tremendous physical and emotional pain right now because of what happened . One human being lost his life. Countless others lost a loved one or had to watch their loved ones suffer. This story is sad. How to solve the problem of violence in St. Louis is up for debate, but anyone who reads the story with a shred of humanity in his or her heart, I think, would have to feel something. Not the delightful commenters on the story about the shootings at stltoday.com, though. In a word, ugh.

bassmaster asks a rhetorical question (which he ends with a period) about leadership:

And he answers it by asserting that leadership is finding a way to use armed forces to "wipe out these thugs."(We all remember what "thug" really means, right?) Death sentences all around! Live next to a "thug?" Well, you're either with us or against us, so unless you welcome the troops like liberators (to show your loyalty, you could tear down a statue!), you can expect to get killed too. After all, their lives don't matter.

The ugly sentiment continues in a disgusting streak of four comments (stltoday's new "old comments at the bottom" default is really annoying, btw). Snag, mr.westcounty, Farik Al Akeem, and ramsrevolution each demonstrates his odious hatred for his fellow human beings with his comment in this string:

There seems to be some disagreement here about whether a "show of force" is needed or whether the police should "redeploy" elsewhere and guard the people whose lives are worth protecting. There is also a semantic difference here between the terrible people who want to lock the "thugs" up in a dungeon and the terrible people who want them to be killed. They certainly agree on one thing though: their lives don't matter. They're "animals" who should be put away for life. Violence in a neighborhood where black folks live? "Almost no problem with" it. "Why is this of any concern?" Their lives don't matter.

Their lives matter so little, in fact, that we should actively seek to end them by, apparently, building walls along arbitrarily drawn lines (What constitutes "the North Side"? Is it about the density of the black population? A certain high enough "thugs" per square mile ratio?) and creating some sort of apocalyptic scenario in the areas of the city we have deemed unfit for continued habitation. Build a wall and distribute guns. They didn't even do that in District 9.

It goes on. bign thinks he's being hilarious:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ITS FUNNY BECAUSE THE BLACK PEOPLE THEY DIED. Their lives don't matter.

TheUnderboss and our old friend drumming umpire have back-to-back comments that really take the cake in the "I don't give a goddamn about human life" department:

drumming umpire, TheUnderboss 12 july.egg

TU has decided to import the new right-wing OMG! du jour and blather on about the "New Black Panthers" and how they want to kill babies. Those militant "thugs" are "the ones to look out for." Who gives a damn about blacks killing blacks. Their lives don't matter.

And, really, what can I say about DU? He seems to have decided that not only don't the lives of black folks on the North Side matter, but neither do the lives of any of those silly liberals who would be stupid enough to live within a nuclear-bomb's-kill-zone of them (incidentally, read the whole thread for some "interesting" perspectives on why living in the City is teh sux or teh roxorz). They're shooting each other? Nuke the bastards.

The high school policy debaters I judged this year liked to strengthen their side by making the case that their opponents' plan - which always involved increasing some sort of social services - would SURELY lead to nuclear war. That line of reasoning is obviously specious, but perhaps I didn't give it enough credit. I like to think that nuclear annihilation is mostly off the table. Most people, I like to tell myself, are completely against using nuclear weapons in response to pretty much anything but an attack that was itself nuclear. But reading bullshit like du's - even though I don't think he would actually pull the lever to drop the bomb on the North Side - makes me realize just how much nuking the bastards is on the table for many, many people in our ridiculous country. I remember hearing idiots talk about dropping nuclear bombs on "The Middle East" after 9/11. As long as we have the warheads, we'll have the idiots who want to use them. Reading even a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people deserve to die in a mushroom cloud because of their proximity to the black part of town reminds me of that fact, and it depresses me.

Our lives don't matter.