Experience
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
It seems pretty obvious that a lot of folks had to settle for experience in the Cambridge Police arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates because they sure didn’t get what they wanted.
Jesse Jackson and Al “Jheri Curl” Sharpton didn’t get a chance to fire up their private jets and wing their way to the aid of a poor downtrodden black guy. They didn’t get the chance to stand in front of clicking cameras and live news crews to dredge up 200 years of black oppression while ignoring the fact that the alleged victim of the racist police overreaction is a very highly paid professor at an Ivy League school.
Professor Gates didn’t get what he wanted. Even with all the wall to wall coverage of this incident he has not gotten the sympathy he was looking for. Noticeable by their absence are the testimonials from colleagues about his irreplaceable contribution to education at Harvard or the “man in the street” interviews with his neighbors bemoaning the cruel treatment of a model neighbor and pillar in the community. Nor does it appear that he will get a chance to tearfully recall in civil court the psychological damage done to him by this incident, insisting that the monetary settlement he is suing the Cambridge Police for has actually nothing to do with the money. He also hasn’t gotten the widespread support he was looking for from anybody outside a small circle in the black community. While he has received apologies from the university and the first black Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, neither of whom had anything to do with the incident so their apologies are meaningless, he did not receive the apology he had asked for from the arresting Sergeant James Crowley.
Gates has said he is looking to just move on rather than continue to be a distraction to the pending ObamaCare health insurance push. He also called this a teaching experience and wished that the Cambridge Police Department would use this incident as a lesson. In other words he is the teacher and they are students, which is strange coming from the guy who was in the handcuffs.
President Barack Hussein Obama didn’t get what he wanted. He was looking to rally support for his long time friend but instead got an earful from police unions and associations around the country. The firestorm has been so one sided in public support of the arresting police officers that the President was forced to apologize for his baseless comments to all those that actually knew the facts. But more importantly Obama was not able to keep from showing his true colors when it comes to issues of race. He has been successful for years avoiding anything racial, but now that he has been elected as president of all the people he has shown, as George Orwell displayed in his classic book Animal Farm, that all of us are equal but some of us are more equal.
We will have to see if Sgt. Crowley gets what he wants. All he has asked for from the President is to get the media off his lawn. It was reported that Crowley was the one to suggest the meeting at the White House for a beer with Obama and Gates. While I am assuming that Crowley was not one of the three people in Cambridge that voted Republican in the last election, I also doubt seriously that it was his idea for the chummy meeting. This “couple a beers” meeting has spin control written all over it. But as a friend of mine jokingly queried, it does lead to some interesting conversations as to what kind of beer each will drink.
Everybody involved got some experience but I doubt anybody actually learned anything from this.
I think it’s safe to say that Gates can’t be taught anything because he is not responsible for anything he does. It is and always will be somebody else’s fault and if he can make it racial, all the better.
Sgt. Crowley didn’t learn anything. As a veteran police officer I am certain he has dealt with pompous jerks before and working in Cambridge I am sure many of them have been from Harvard.
As for Barack Obama, he has been warned repeatedly about going off the script. He knew better than to speak his mind and show his racist attitude, well learned from years of tutelage by Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
And the American people, well we will just have to wait and see.
