Garbanzo Toons

On Forcing an Agenda

On May 4th, 91 year old Leonard Sims was carjacked. That's bad, but it gets worse.

At age 91, Leonard Sims considers himself a forgiving man.

But he's not ready to forgive the 22-year-old Detroit man accused of mercilessly punching him two dozen times during a May 4 carjacking in a convenience store parking lot.

And even worse.

The beating was captured on a store surveillance camera and the story has since gone national.

Sims' 83-year-old wife, Nora, said she's glad that the country can see the tape, which shows a group of people standing nearby, refusing to come to Sims' aid.

Can any more insult be added to that sordid episode? Funny you should ask. It doesn't take much for local columnist, Rochelle Riley, to use that episode to advance an agenda I reported on here. According to Riley,

Twenty-one.

That's how many vicious blows Leonard Sims endured on May 4 from an idiot trying to take his car.

A heap at a bus stop.

That's what Andrew Anthos became last February when he was felled by what many believed to be a homophobic attack, but the coroner eventually said was a vicious form of arthritis that attacked his spine and caused him to fall and hit his head.

The two Detroit cases are linked by a common thread, a nagging fact, something more than the national attention each received.

In both cases, someone else was there, at the scene, near the victim. And in both cases, they did nothing.

And,

In both cases, justice still appears elusive. Something is missing. Or, more accurately, someone.

I agree that in the Sims case, the people who stood and watch are scum. If they were at least minimally civilized, they would have intervened. In Anthos' case, there is doubt whether there was a witness who walked away. That doesn't fit the "gays as victims" agenda, so there must have been a homophobic attack. If they can't have that, then they will grudingly accept a homophobe, who somehow knew by looking at him that Anthos was gay and so he left him to die after he was felled by arthritis. I hate to be the one to point this out, but dieases are outside the scope of our criminal justice system.

One of the big problems I'm having with some of our local and national pundits, columnists, etc, is the saying that, "everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to there own facts." I'm finding that writers on one side of the debate are allowed their own facts.

Labels: Andrew Anthos, Leonard Sims, Rochelle Riley

posted by Harry @ 7:17 PM