This is what failure looks like: A Major League Baseball game — created solely to entertain people — played with no people watching. And I’m wondering whether all our efforts to bring people together have been as empty as these stands.
This week’s Baltimore riots are just the most recent example of what we’ve been seeing for 50 years: Protests by minorities against what they perceive as an unjust, uncaring system.
“There is so much pent up frustration from our youth, so if you have a hot pot unattended…it will boil over,” said a Baltimore resident.
Just as it boiled over in Baltimore in 1968, when there were two weeks of riots there following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“This is not new. And we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new,” said President Barack Obama.
So don’t be fooled by the calm in Baltimore today. We are not curing the anger in our country. We’re just containing it.
“I think the biggest thing is that citizens are safe, the city is stable, we hope to maintain it that way,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.
But maintaining isn’t changing.
“And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities,” said President Obama. “And the occasional riots in the streets. And everybody will feign concern until it goes away and then we go about our business as usual.”
Our business as usual isn’t working.
We have success stories of minorities making it, but not enough.
So we need to do what our GPS does when we’re not going where we want to: We need to recalculate.