The Wisdom of 8 Minutes and 46 seconds (18)

Wisdom would tell us that we are in a crisis in our Country. The death of George Floyd has sparked protest in every major city in our Country. Black lives Matter, I Cant Breath and now get your knee off my neck can be heard from young and old.

Now we are hearing Abolish the Police, De Fund the Police or at minimum Restructure the police. I have mixed emotions about the Abolishing the police but as I get an understanding I know something has to be done so that thy can stop killing us.

The Bible says The Lord gives wisdom from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. Its time we ask the Lord what to do. What is the solution for the madness.

First we need to understand the DNA of policing. Even though we read on their cars protect and serve the history of American policing is dark and ugly. The slave patrol was the beginning of policing. Patty rollers they were called.

This was, in fact, the first systematic form of policing in the land that would become the United States. The northeast colonies relied on the informal “night-watch” system of volunteer policing and on private security to protect commercial property. In the southern colonies, policing’s origins were rooted in the slave economy and the radically racialized social order that invented “whiteness” as the ultimate boundary. “Whites,” no matter how poor or low, could not be held in slavery. “Blacks” could be enslaved by anyone—whites, free blacks, and people of mixed race. The distinction—and the economic order that created it—was maintained by a legally sanctioned system of surveillance, intimidation, and brute force whose purpose was the control of blacks. Slave patrols, or paddyrollers, were the chief enforcers of this system; groups of armed, mounted whites who rode at night among the plantations and settlements of their assigned “beats”—the word originated with the patrols—seeking out runaway slaves, unsanctioned gatherings, weapons, contraband, and generally any sign of potential revolt. They were the stuff of lore and songs:

Run Nigger run, Patty Roller will catch you, Run Nigger run I’ll shoot you with my flintlock gun. Run nigger run, Patty Roller will catch you, Run, nigger run, you’d better get away.

Slave patrols usually consisted of three to six white men on horseback equipped with guns, rope, and whips. “A mounted man presents an awesome figure, and the power and majesty of a group of men on horseback, at night, could terrify slaves into submission,” writes Sally Hadden in her fine and useful book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Among other duties, paddyrollers enforced the pass system, which required all slaves absent from their master’s property to have a pass, or “ticket,” signed by the master indicating permission for travel. Any slave encountered without a pass was subject to detention and beating on the spot, although possession of a valid pass was by no means a guarantee against beating.

Certain people, granted power, can be counted on to abuse those under their authority just because they can;

White supremacy continued as the dominant reality for the next hundred years, a social and psychological reality maintained by terror, surveillance, and the letter of the law. Its power was such that even the New Deal—the most profound reordering of American society since the Civil War—left white supremacy intact. Twenty-six lynchings were recorded in Southern states in 1933.

Many southern cities were terrorized by.the Klan. This vigilanty justice was responsible 99 years ago for burning down Tulsa Oklahoma, The Black Wall Street. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history." The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States.

We still have not recovered from the murder of Emmit Till in 1955, The 4 little girls killed in Birmingham Alabama in 1963. As soon as we get past one event it seems like another comes along.

We don’t have to know the particulars of history in order to live it in our bones. Sometimes history arrives as a sense of the uncanny, the peculiar weight of certain words and acts, a suffusion of dreadful power.

We might suppose the pass system is long gone, but there it is in stop-and-frisk, in racial profiling, in the reflexive fear and violence of our own time. Trayvon Martin, 17 years old, walking down the street just minding his own, killed by a self-anointed, night-riding, so-called neighborhood watchman. Sandra Bland, died in a Texas jail after being pulled over for failure to signal a lane change. Walter Scott, stopped by police in North Charleston for an allegedly broken taillight, shot to death with eight bullets in his back. Philando Castile, popular school cafeteria supervisor, shot dead in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, during a traffic stop for, allegedly, a broken taillight (accounts differ); records reveal that he’d been pulled over no fewer than 52 times by local police in the preceding 14 years and owed over $6,000 in outstanding fines. That $6,000 in fines opens the window onto another ugly echo of times past, the use of law enforcement to extract profit from black and brown people.

Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Ferguson police led to the exposure of a municipal regime that deployed police less for the sake of public safety than as a means of plundering the African-American community. In 2010, Ferguson’s finance director informed the police chief that “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year.” A new “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative… to fill the revenue pipeline” is plainly documented, and by Oct. 31, 2014, the municipal courts of Ferguson, a town of 21,000 residents (two-thirds of whom are black), had handled no fewer than 53,000 traffic cases that year. By 2015, more than one-fifth of the town’s revenue would come from fines and fees. The community’s frustration after years of harassment, abuse, and humiliation at the hands of the police would finally explode in the protests that followed Michael Brown’s death.

Some facts sit heavier in the gut than others. It may be that the American brain is wired for certain cues, or maybe it’s just the nature of systems of control, systems that grant or withhold sanction to move about, to work, to vote, to be secure in your home and body, to be free of suspicion absent evidence to the contrary. Sanction, in other words, to exercise your full humanity. Slave patrols and passes, the Klan, Jim Crow—these are historical incarnations of a social order that held people of color to less-than status, the necessary corollary to white supremacy.

Wisdom will tell America that we are tired. Exhausted. Today and yesterday they are protesting in Atlanta because another unarmed black man has been shot by the police,

I mean look we were trying to process Amauh Albry , then Briana Taylor then George Floyd now Rashard Brooks. He was shot in the back and the butt. You would think maybe just maybe in this current climate that cops would try to deescalate situations. Nah they are going at it like its just another day.

WHAT IS MISSING IS jUSTICE. For the LORD gives wisdom;

from his mouth come knowledge and understanding;

7  he stores up sound wisdom for the upright;

he is a shield to those who walk in integrity,

8  guarding the paths of justice

and watching over the way of his saints.

I particularly like Proverbs Chapter 2. Because it gives us a road map to understanding the three qualities that seems to be missing in the world today.

Righteousness

Justice

Equity

Verse 9 said Then you will understand righteousness and justice

and equity, every good path; (Pr 2:9).

We have to get wisdom. Its time for America to get wise. When we get wisdom we will really enjoy life. for wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul; 11  discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you, 12  delivering you from the way of evil, from men of perverted speech, 13  who forsake the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness, 14  who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perverseness of evil, 15  men whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Pr 2:10–15). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.