Icheoku says Terrence Howard once told his ex-wife, Michelle Ghent, "divorce me and do what you wish with me but please do not crush my families' already threatened livelihood. I can’t promise how I will respond if you do." In order words, please don't go there with my family's very survival because if you do, I don't know how I am going to react? It therefore goes without saying that every human-being has a threshold of endurance and limits as to what is acceptable or tolerable, beyond which there is no guarantee of still remaining sanely cool faced with a continuing situation or circumstance.
So why does America continuously push the buttons of these despondent black America youths, expecting them to always react with level-headiness and their minds still intact or as a monk would docilely react? If America does not want the nature of the reaction coming from these irate youths, is it not a better policy going forward, not to promote the circumstances that elicits or triggers this reaction? Why set a ball in motion only to later complain that the ball is rolling too fast? Why start the act that begets or elicits such loathsome reaction and then turn around to complain that the effected is overreacting; because if there was no action in the first place there will be no reaction, talkless of it being over or too much. How can anyone blame a provoked people for some unintended consequences of what was forced upon them and at the same time excluding the police that started it from any blame? A police who acted under the color of their uniform in fermenting all manner of unwanted and unwarranted killings of unarmed young American males? Why expect these young African Americans not to react but to just turn the other chic, sit down and take it?
Why would President Obama open his mouth and use it in this way and against a people, whose fate he once shared and whose challenges he once faced while running the streets of South-side Chicago just a few short decades ago? Why would President Obama not appreciate the sensitivity implicated in the Baltimore protest, not to have used such derogatory remarks in describing a people who were pushed to the wall and who are merely intending for their voices to be heard by a seeming deaf white society America that acts as if black life don't matter? Why throw the protesters under the bus while sparing the police brutality that caused the harm, the reason de'tre for the protest? Icheoku asks why, President Obama, why?
Icheoku asks if people who were merely drawing attention to the continuing plight of young African Americans, whose lives are being continuously cut down in this drastic manner and without consequence, are 'thugs and criminals', what then are those who caused the problem which these people are protesting against? Icheoku asks if people who merely destroyed some replaceable properties are 'thugs and criminals', what then are those police officers who destroyed an irreplaceable innocent human life? Should they be called murderers and would the president be courageous enough to mouth same accordingly? Except that Icheoku forgot that the same President Obama was once forced to make a mea culpa and organize a beer fest of appeasement of a Boston police officer, whom he called "stupid" for exactly doing a very stupid thing, arresting Professor Gates in his home just because he mistook him for a burglar, being a black-man in the particular neighborhood?
But now, because there is no group to pile pressure on the president over the foul word he used in describing those Baltimore protesters, whom he thoughtlessly branded 'thugs and criminals', there may never be an apology or a beer party in the White House gardens to smoothen these ruffled feathers? Icheoku says calling people who were merely trying to draw attention to some existential threat and predicament to them in America, being young black men in America, thugs and criminals, is to say the least very demeaning? To President Barack Hussein Obama, Icheoku says not in our name. Please find a place and time to similarly organize this time, a barbecue summit of appeasement, to atone for your sin of derogating these young men and women of Baltimore. These protesters are not 'thugs and criminals' but courageous young Americans who are merely fed up and frustrated at the continuum that is police raging brutality against them and were trying to merely vent their anger. Therefore, an apology will be in order and the appropriate thing to do; at least you owe them that, so make it.
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