Mountain Views News, Pasadena Edition [Sierra Madre] Saturday, February 23, 2019

B3

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, February 23, 2019 


CHRISTOPHER Nyerges

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Hail Hamilton


POLICE CHASES: 

Why must the television news stations report them live?

Sometimes, I have time to watch television in the evenings, and there 
are a few things I look forward to. For example, I really like Doc Martin, 
the BBC program about a quirky doctor in some small English town.

But I particularly look forward to watching the 11 p.m. local news, 
mostly to see the weather reports for the following few days. It gives me 
a chance to see how my outdoor activities might need to be modified if there is rain forecast, 
or high temperatures.

However, for reasons that I have not fathomed, whenever someone decides not to stop for the 
police and makes a run for it, we are forced to watch the entire chase, boring as it usually is.

Last night was no exception. After the first five minutes of the news, and the weather teaser, 
we were told that the police were in pursuit of a suspect, and then we watched from the helicopter’s 
point of view as four or five police vehicles followed a van on local freeways. That 
meant that for the remaining 25 or so minutes of what was expected to be actual news, I was 
forced to watch a scene of a van at high speeds with police cars in pursuit.

I turned the channel. I was not surprised – though I was dismayed –to find that every other 
11 p.m. news channel was covering the same event, from pretty much the same angle. Channel 
2, 4, 5, 7 – nothing but the police chase! My time was wasted, and I only waited by the TV 
because I hoped they’d have some sense and at least cut in and give me the weather report. At 
the very least, they could have put the chase scene into a little box on the bottom of the screen 
so that those who really got excited by the chase could see it, and the rest of us could hear the 
weather report and other news.

I have never been privy to the offices of the news stations who make such decisions that a police 
chase is now the top priority and we’re going to cover it, until the end. For many reasons, 
it’s a bad decision, and should be changed.

For one thing, I often wonder if the fleeing person has a radio or small TV in their car, and is 
listening to the newscasters who are telling the viewing audience where the police are located, 
how many police are following, and speculating on what tactics the police might use to end 
the chase. If I were a police officer, I’d find this very intrusive of my work. In some cases 
in the past, because of the non-stop television exposure, people would be out on the street, 
cheering on the fleeing person in some cases, and generally getting in the way of the police 
activity. That wouldn’t have happened if the television station simply reported the news of 
the chase after it was over, and informed us about the outcome. 

Another reason why I find the chase so mundane is that the newscaster are practically pulling 
hairs to keep a conversation going, especially when it is a prolonged chase. The commentary 
is predictable.

Is it a male or female driver? How many people are in the car? How much gas do you think 
they have left? I wonder where they are going? Do you think they will turn around and head 
back to where they came? Do you think he has a gun? Is the car stolen? Can we read the license 
plates? Why did they not stop from the police? It goes on and on, with mindless prattle 
about the details that concern the police but not the average TV viewer.

And sometimes it’s worse than that. We watch on live TV as a driver being pursued hits other 
cars, hurts people, kills people. It’s bad enough that it’s happening, but it makes it worse to 
think that the pursuing driver might actually be listening to the news report and deriving 
some sick glory from all the attention he (or she) is getting.

I think George Orwell would be proud of his ability to see the mindlessness of the people of 
the future of which he wrote. When every television station is fixated on watching the police 
chase someone, I can only think of Orwell and his insightful “1984.” Admittedly, sometimes 
we are told that the person fleeing is a felon, or has just shot someone, or some other fact 
about the matter, though we almost never learn the outcome of the chase. Sometimes it ends 
within the allotted time frame, and often it doesn’t. But even if we watch a car stop, and the 
guy get out, and get arrested, it is always a big “so what?” to me, because we still do not have 
any idea of the full picture of what just transpired – and the worse part is that I do not get to 
hear the weather report!

Suggestion: Call, write, or email your local television station, and tell them that you’re not 
satisfied with the incessant coverage of police chases. Their contact information is readily 
available on-line. Of course, if you like watching such chases, then do nothing, and everything 
will stay the same, and I’ll just have to start looking up the weather reports on-line…


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HAIL Hamilton

 

With Black History 
Month soon coming 
to an end, I thought 
it would be appropriate 
with all the negative 
things I’ve heard 
said about people 
of various races, ethnicities, countries of 
origins, and to say something about involuntary 
servitude. YES! Slavery still exists, 
especially here in the United States—and I 
don’t mean “white slavery,” or involuntary 
servitude involving prostitution or child 
pornography.

 By “slavery” I mean when someone 
is forced to work for little low no pay, and 
has none of the protections given to most 
American workers by federal and state labor 
laws. The kind of slavery I’m referring 
to exists in our criminal justice system, 
where more then two-thirds of all inmates 
awaiting trial and of all prison inmates are 
people of color—mostly black and hispanic. 
People who cannot afford bail or private legal 
representation. Just the thought of the 
nearly 3 million people suffering out of 
sight, out of mind, incarcerated as modern 
slaves, in this day and age, here in America, 
should render any civilized human being 
wretchedly ill with disgust. 

 This all is not to say that no progress 
among races, ethnicities, even between 
various countries and cultures has not been 
made. It just means that, like anything else 
complex and difficult, progress has been 
slow and not without much intentional, 
institutional backsliding. Most often the 
backsliding is caused by men like President 
Trump who seem determined for their 
own selfish political purposes to divide us 
among ourselves like an angry linch mob by 
fanning the flames of our differences, rather 
than pulling us together us as one people 
who despite our differences are united by a 
common purpose, and destiny. 

 To realize those uniquely American 
values that Abraham Lincoln so eloquently 
stated in his eulogy to the dead in his Gettysburg 
Address: “… that we here highly 
resolve that these dead shall not have died 
in vain that this nation, under God, shall 
have a new birth of freedom, and that government 
of the people, by the people, for 
the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

 It should be no surprise that by keeping 
us divided and pitted against one an 
other serves their purposes, maintaining 
their power over us, while allowing 
to enrich themselves at our expense. This 
is what is happening today in America. 
Trump and his cohorts are keeping us in 
a perpetual state of chaos and fear. Watch 
out or the boogyman will get you! Nothing 
new here. Mass political control through 
machinations was perhaps best described 
in two works of fiction. published centuries 
apart: Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), and 
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). 

 I just had a optimistic thought. I would 
gladly give up my column space to reproduce 
Norman Rockwell’s idyllic Americana 
paintings of FDR’s “Four Freedoms:” 
“Freedom Of Speech,” “Freedom Of Worship,” 
“Freedom From Want,” and “Freedom 
From Fear.” I would add one additional 
Rockwell painting. The one with the 
negro elementary student being escorted to 
class past the racism and bigotry obviously 
surrounding her that accompanied court-
ordered desegregation of public schools after 
the March 17, 1954 landmark Supreme 
Court unanimous (9-0) decision in Brown 
v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. 

 It was Brown, that overturned Plessy 
v. Ferguson’s heinous doctrine of “separate 
but equal” (1896), had given birth to American 
“apartheid” that ruled the nation for 
the next 58 years. Brown’s decision ironically 
written by a white man, Chief Justice 
Earl Warren, leading an all white Supreme 
Court. It was the decision of these nine 
men that finally defined the true constitutional 
meaning of the word “equal” as applied 
to the “Equal Protection Claus” of the 
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 
saying simply, but loud enough and clear 
enough for the whole nation to hear, that 
“equal” from this time forward meant just 
what it said. it meant that equal meant in 
legal terms equality before the law, regardless 
of race, skin color, ethnicity, status or 
economic class, religion, culture, or country 
of origin.

 Of course, over the succeeding years 
Brown would be expanded to cover many 
other forms of invidious discrimination 
and it would take the majority of the next 
three generations of Americans to understand 
the wisdom of Martin Luther King, 
Jr.’s words written while imprisoned in the 
Birmingham Jail for leading a non-violent 
civil rights demonstration against segregation 
in public accommodations and employment, 
“Justice delayed too long,” he 
said. “is justice denied.” How much truer 
and simply put can a statement of the righteousness 
of basic human rights in a just 
civil society be said?

 I can remember as a kid watching 
TV as negro boys and girls were being brutally 
attacked by police dogs, and fire hosed 
against brick buildings in places like Little 
Rock, Selma, Montgomery, Greensboro, 
and a hundred other small towns and cities 
below the Mason-Dixie Line where whites 
were trying to keep negroes in their proper 
subservient place and maintain the status 
quo in white southern society. 

 Later I would witness the racial violence 
move north, east, and west—where 
segregation was even more inescapably vile. 
So, here we are 70 years later back where we 
started… AGAIN! How can this possibly 
be true after all the intervening years and 
litigation? How? I thought America had 
grown up, matured and become a much 
better society. Was I wrong… or just naive?

LOOKING BACK—WAS I WRONG OR 
JUST NAIVE? 


GRAHAM WEST


AN UNUSUAL EMERGENCY

Just days ago, President Donald Trump finally 
signed a bipartisan bill to keep the U.S. government 
open and functioning for longer than a stopgap 
amount of time. He also declared a national 
emergency in order to do what the funding bill 
didn’t: reallocate money for his border wall.

It was an extraordinary step to address what one might call an “unusual” 
emergency. The White House was quick to point out that presidents 
have declared more than 50 national emergencies since the National 
Emergencies Act became law in 1976. But has there ever been an emergency 
quite like this one?

Has there ever been an emergency where the “crisis” exists for two years, 
but it doesn’t become an “emergency” until the president’s party loses 
the House in the midterms? Because the Republican Party held both the 
House and Senate for the first half President Trump’s term, and he didn’t 
build the wall then.

Has there ever been an emergency where our national security and 
intelligence leaders didn’t sound the alarm to Congress? Because Director 
of National Intelligence Dan Coates, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and 
CIA Director Gina Haspel didn’t mention the urgent need for a wall in 
their Worldwide Threat Assessment briefing last month.

Has there ever been an emergency where the military was deployed to deal 
with a situation, but that wasn’t sufficient to resolve the crisis? Because 
the Trump Administration has sent thousands of active duty troops and 
National Guardsmen to the southern border already and continues to 
keep them there, even though former Secretary of Defense James Mattis 
admitted that their long term mission is “somewhat to be determined.”

Has there ever been an emergency where the president has repeated so 
many falsehoods, exaggerations, and made-up anecdotes? Because from 
denying the facts about drug trafficking in legal ports of entry to telling 
harrowing tales of women with their mouths duct taped closed (that no 
one can verify), this president has done a remarkably poor job of basing 
his case in facts or reason.

And has there ever been an emergency where the president declared it and 
then jetted off to his private vacation club? Because that’s what President 
Trump did last week: He signed the papers, and promptly flew off to Mar-
a-Lago for a long weekend on our dime. 

There has been no emergency like this, of course, because there is no 
emergency. The president’s own actions and rhetoric (he literally said 
he “didn’t need to do this” while declaring the emergency) make that 
point clear. It’s a ridiculous executive overreach meant to pander to the 
president’s base and his own ego.

Thankfully, there is a way out of this non-emergency. The aforementioned 
National Emergencies Act allows for either house of Congress to pass a 
repudiation of a president’s national emergency declaration; if passed, it 
then forces the other house to vote on that same resolution.

In other words, Democrats in the House of Representatives can call the 
president’s bluff on this fake emergency - and then force Republicans 
in the Senate to take a stance, which should be interesting given how 
many of them said they were against the declaration before the president 
made it. It would be interesting to know how their concerns about fiscal 
responsibility, comprehensive border security, and the U.S. Constitution 
stack up against their willingness to challenge the president.

Regardless of the outcome, it has never been more clear that we are living 
through a test of our democracy and its associated norms and rules. This 
“unusual” emergency only drives that point home.

Graham F. West is the Communications Director for Truman Center for National 
Policy and Truman National Security Project, though views expressed here are his 
own. You can reach West at gwest@trumancnp.org.

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