Blood Red Christmas (Christmas 2021, Part One.)

Thou Shalt Not Kill. ~Exodus 20:13

Former officer Kim Potter was found guilty and taken into custody this afternoon.

Good.

But there's something here that bothers me.

The defense tried to say that she should not be taken into custody at this time because...get this...she's a devout Catholic and it's Christmas.

Fucking seriously?

First of all as far as I'm concerned "Devout Catholic" kind of falls flat as a defense when you killed somebody and just got found guilty of First Degree murder.

Like, what the fuck ever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"

Forgiveness of sins and the spirit of the Holidays is great. Somebody can make sure she gets a nice Christmas care package in the slammer. 

Thing is, as I was always taught you do the crime, you got to do the time. You do wrong, you got to pay for it, and show remorse and change your behavior. She killed somebody, she's part of a culture where that happens too much. Somebody has to be called to account and in this case it's her.

Again, good. Somebody got justice for Christmas. I don't see why religion should be a defense against that. Doesn't Christianity...according to the Bible at least...call for justice for all as a matter of course?

What about Duante Wright? As a young Black man he was most likely religious too, how come nobody brought that up? What about his family? How do you think they're doing this Christmas? I'm serious, I'm sick of lawyers and the media ass-kissing cops, the privileged, and Republicans...even when these fucking people have just been convicted of a goddamned crime! I mean, for fuck's sake, she murdered a kid!

Seriously is this person's claimed religiosity supposed to excuse the fact that she broke one of the ten primary laws laid down by her own alleged God?

Merry fucking Christmas, huh?

I'm also going to remind you that this woman was a field training officer for her department, and she claims that she intended to draw and use her taser rather than draw and fire her sidearm. I'm here to tell you, as somebody who knows a little about this. If she knew her right from her left, much less had been properly trained...that shouldn't have been possible, period. The way your gear is arranged is set up that way, to avoid exactly this, because if something happens you go on autopilot, muscle memory, training.

So either she was badly trained, or she was lying, and in either case she shouldn't have been there.

Religion be damned, either you have the character as a person to know when you fucked up, and take the consequences, or you don't.

Either you know what you're doing, or you don't. If your job involves carrying a weapon, bad character or incompetence should disqualify you from it especially if you're dealing with the public.

I don't give a damn if you think the public is a bunch of idiots who hate your guts and want to fuck with you or shank you in the back or not. If you think that, isn't it your job to be better than that? All too many seem to fail to get that. Several of my bros back in the day were Black or Latino (or both, in one case) and they all said the same thing, all too often, the Police conduct themselves just like another damn gang.

And Kim Potter is apparently no goddamned exception.

To say that I have no goddamned sympathy for this lady or her family is a fucking understatement and I hope she enjoys every bite of that jail-food Christmas dinner.

And that is not a joke.

Like Stonekettle said "I hope they add an extra year to her sentence just for pulling this bullshit."

I'm serious. 

I have no tolerance for racism.

I have no tolerance for stupidity.

And I have even less tolerance than that for hypocrisy. And that is, on all counts, exactly what's going on here.

If you want to lean on your religious credentials, and do your job properly, that's Okay.

I might not like you for it, but this is America, you can do that.

If you want to murder somebody under color of authority, then lean on your religion to get out of being taken into custody to await sentencing like any other common killer, that's Not Okay.

And if you don't understand why, you're a part of the fucking problem.

We regard life as too cheap in this country, and treat profit and social status as if they are sacred things.

As if you can spend money or be all that when you're dead.

And the conservative Christian tradition I used to be a part of has changed to reflect exactly this.

Here's Franklin Graham literally describing his own religion as a death cult, saying Jesus was the "only person born to die" as if that isn't something we're all going to do eventually. I'll just go ahead and let you think about that for a second.

I guess it's not so hard to figure out how a supposedly-devout person like Kim Potter could just draw her pistol and shoot somebody down like it was nothing, then lie about it later, huh?

For this death cult to be happy in this time of year, somebody's got to have a blood-red Christmas.

Just so long as it isn't them.

It's Christmas, where we celebrate the humble birth of a King whose Kingdom was not of this world, who grew up to be nothing more to Earthly eyes than a carpenter and an itinerant Rabbi that the Scriptures themselves say had no place to sleep a lot of the time. He would preach his message, gather a following, and then be falsely accused and murdered by the Romans on bullshit charges from religious authorities whose power He became a threat to.

Just think about that, think about that and all that it implies vs. what Christianity has too often become. (And note, I say this as a former Christian myself.)

Christianity is far too often nothing but cosplay righteousness for the powerful and privileged at best, in the middle it's often just a cover for evil deeds, and it's a cult of power and white supremacy at its worst.

The Pharisees fucking won, at least in this world. Power values death over compassion.

And I think I can pretty well guess what He would have to say about that, much less some person trying to use religiosity as a shield to delay the consequences for a crime.

Especially religiosity in the Church one of His bros would later start, in this particular case.

My guess is, it would probably involve an impressive amount of profanity in several languages, and it would get pretty loud. And probably a whole bunch of people would go to Hell.

The purpose of Jesus was the Resurrection, not death. His purpose was not to practice Sin or to enable it, but to overcome it. Eternal life requires compassion, not greed. It requires loving your neighbors, not killing them.

We can change our future, people. What will happen is not set.

But if that's what we want, we have to be better than this.