It appears that six young people from two families have drowned in the Red River today. None of the young people could swim and they were on a sand bar in a natural river recreating. Apparently one of the drowning youth, a fourteen year old, was rescued. This was in North Louisiana. The drowned teens were all apparently both black and African-Americans. One young person who was not of such a description and may or may not have participated in the successful rescue of the one that did survive reported losing another victim he was attempting to rescue from beneath the waters. Yahoo News has the basic story on video and in text: http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/21202902. I wonder how many ways issues of race affect this story and are important to policy but are not being considered. The good probability that blacks in the age of Obama found directives about anything distasteful and not worth their time is pretty high. Not learning to swim and endangering themselves and other have a racial element.
In addition to this, I saw a report in which a young woman was injured severely, and may still die, from being dropped one hundred feet on to the ground instead of released on to a net from a similar distance. The girl’s father was a doctor. He claims she was dead when he got to her. There is a story with some illustrations at this site: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/03/earlyshow/main6738986.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentAux
Here it seems to me one has to at least consider some other things as upsetting as suggesting that Black Teen culture may have reached all the way to rural Louisiana to help kill those six kids. A culture of short-cuts may have squeezed the life out of these black Americans, if in fact all were black and even if only one family was black. Here in the park I would want to consider cold-blooded murder as a possibility. I would want to examine all the reasons why it might have happened. Presumably it is an act of negligence or recklessness in a social context. But the act itself was a near execution. I think cold-blooded murder and thrill-killing deserve to be considered.
This blog is written by someone who is moving a little further from the stream and flow of daily American life with each passing year. But if we are reaching appoint where we cannot ask ugly questions that the ugly facts may suggest in ugly situations then we truly are dooming ourselves in yet another way.
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