Citizen Reaction to Other Citizen Reactions

A friend of mine emailed me this today. Originally I wasn't going to post anything about my emotional reaction to the idiots heckling the police as cited in Chip Johnson's column. My friend expressed his anger more eloquently than I could:

I am interested by the response of some in the Oakland community to the murder of the four officers this weekend.

While the vast majority of Oaklanders were shocked by these crimes, some people gathered near the scene of the initial shootings to celebrate the deaths of the officers. In the Chronicle this morning, it was reported that Mr. Mixon, the man who shot the officers, had a lengthy rap sheet and was connected to an unsolved rape in Oakland a few months prior and may have been responsible for another murder in 2007. Apparently, a crowd gathered near the apartment in which Mixon was killed to pay respects to that great young man, with a member of that crowd calling Mixon a "soldier." Indeed. A soldier whose righteous missions included terrorizing innocents in Oakland through theft, assault, rape, and murder. Such a soldier would be right at home in the Sudanese army.

They also pointed to Oakland's hsitory of police mistreatment of blacks as justification for the four officer deaths. I am sure that Mixon's thoughts were solely focused on racial injustice when he first opened fire. His sister recently told the Chronicle that Mixon was "not a monster." I beg to f**king differ. Your brother was nothing short of a monster and the real tragedy here is that he was born at all. The ability of people to feed themselves lines of bullshit never ceases to amaze me.

He goes on to describe his two degrees of separation-experience; it turns out that Dan Sakai was a friend of a friend. I think a lot of people in the East Bay are going to have this experience this week.