It’s been over a week since the Grand Jury rendered a
verdict in the Ferguson case. Looking at happenings in the area some evenings,
you might think that it was never rendered at all. While the President and the Attorney
General put on a late and unconvincing call for restraint, the usual suspects
are making the circuit in talk shows and op-eds. Despite the findings of the
Grand Jury, a vocal crowd insists that there should have been a trial. The fact
that a Grand Jury convenes specifically to determine if the evidence warrants
charges and a trial seems is met with blank stares or shouting, with an
occasional helping of looting and tear gas on the side.
A number of justifications have been offered for the need of
a trial. Some point to historic injustice in the area, as if the results of a
show trial had the ability to change the past. Others hint that it will show
the community that their cries had been heard, as though denying process to a
lone police officer will somehow herald a better future.
Perhaps the worst justification, or at least the one that I
dislike the most hinges on the term “closure.” I was listening to Fox News the
other day, and I believe that it was Alan Colmes, liberal commentator and Obama
apologist, who indicated that a trial would have helped provide “closure” for
the area. I’m not a clairvoyant by trade, so I am hesitant to say what the
result of such a try might portend. I am an engineer, an examiner of data.
Based on my observations, a trial might result in a number of things for the
community, but closure? I think not.
Since the term was introduced into the pseudo-psychological
babble that passes for analysis in some quarters, it has seemed to take on
almost a sacred state, a religious significance. Those who achieve it find
bliss. Those who fail remain in torment. It is pursued through meditation and ritual,
taught as the ultimate goal. It is the be-all, end-all. The Christ, not for our
own sins, but for the sins that life heaps upon us. It’s the balm for every
conflict that life hands us that ends in something less than “happily ever
after.”
It is a sham.
When I was growing up, “closure” referred to removing the
access to something that was open. We had another term for the situations
mentioned above: Acceptance. It required no meditation, no ceremony, no trials,
no “understanding generations of anger.” (I still don’t by the way. I keep
trying, but it makes no sense at all to me. If anyone can help, use the comment
block.)
Acceptance was the power that God gave each and every person
who asked, and more than a few who did not, to move forward when life dealt
them a hard blow. And unlike “closure,” there was no pretense that it could or
should be sought on a community level. It was personal, the same way love or
hate or forgiveness is personal. While others can work to help or hinder the
process, it always started and ended on the personal level.
This idea that a trial will somehow aid Ferguson in
achieving “closure” is simply wrong. If that were the case, the Grand Jury
verdict would have worked just as well. That people both inside and outside the
community vowed to protest regardless of what verdict was reached shows that
closure is not the goal. For those who live to stir dissension, it never is.
While a show trial would not achieve closure for a
community, there are possibilities that some find appealing. The easiest to
foresee is the destruction of Officer Wilson. For as long as the trial went on,
he would be hauled through every bit of slime the race mongers could dredge up,
scourged as a symbol of all that is wrong with American justice, all the while
doing nothing that could hope to improve it. It would probably ruin him
financially. A trial of this nature would be a bit beyond a public defender,
especially with the legal guns likely brought to bear. And afterward, with his
finances in ruin, how could he recover? Who would hire him? For that matter,
who will hire him?
It’s often been said that a rising tide lifts all boats. I
believe that is true. I also believe the opposite: When society reaches out to
drag a single person down unfairly, so that diminishes all. It is a lesson well
displayed in history, not that many bother with such things anymore. People
believe what they wish much of the time. It was not so long ago that lynch mobs
were a far too common sight in America. They too believed that they were
carrying out “justice.” And if the word had meant anything to them, they might
also have said that they were looking for “closure.”
Everything old is new again.
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