Here Are Some People Who Feel Really Bad for Darren Wilson

Darren Wilson is currently sitting on $400,000 in donations, 107 days paid vacation, the glow of a recent wedding, and a community that supports his interests to the point that he won’t have to face trial for shooting an unarmed black teenager through the top of the head from 150 feet away. In the face of Darren Wilson’s hardships, a few brave Americans voice their support.

Within this category of sentiment, there is a special sub-category: the people who are saying that Darren Wilson’s “life is over,” displaying an utter confusion about words and meaning similar to Bob McCulloch’s statement that the grand jury “gave up their lives.”

And of course, we can trace this sentiment back to where it all started, with the St. Louis County police citing Wilson as the victim and Brown as the suspect.

I normally don’t put much stock in looking at collections of the tweets of idiots. I know these posts come early and often, any time there’s something for someone to be wrong about. But in this case, there’s a crucial difference: these people, all these tweeters, represent the side of power. They are the 66% of white people who think the police response has been reasonable, the 47% of white people who think the importance of race in Ferguson has been overblown. They are the blind, dumb calls for “peace” in this situation, the ones who see the lack of an indictment for Wilson and think not only that it’s reasonable but that even the suggestion has gone too far.

In the meantime, as people continue to place their sympathies in interesting places, the life of Michael Brown has been ruled significantly less valuable than the life of a common police dog, and the long legacy of police impunity and at-best-theoretical racial equality steamrollers on.