The incident between Officer James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr demonstrates just what a powerful grip fictional narratives have on the minds of leftists. All the leftists in the country, from the President on down, fervently believe that Crowley acted out of racial animosity but they can’t explain what action of Crowley’s indicates his racial animosity. Instead, they must rely on a narrative shared by the subculture to convince each other that Crowley must be wrong.
Leftists are clearly caught up in two narratives. First, they have the narrative of black man versus white cop. In this narrative, one need only plug the race and role of each person into the narrative and the narrative will tell them who was absolutely wrong and who was absolutely right. Since Crowley was the white cop, the narratives says he acted wrongly. Case closed.
The second narrative is the hindsight narrative. This is a narrative in which the actions of participants in an event are explained in terms of information known in hindsight, not the information each participant had at the time. In hindsight, we all know that Gates was a legal resident in his home and that the report of break-in was a false alarm. With that information, the hindsight narrative creates a story in which Crowley is clearly a bully harassing an old man for illegitimate reasons.
We can dismiss the first narrative outright because it is simply racist. We should always evaluate individuals based on their own actions not on our arbitrary inclusion of them in some stereotyped group. The second narrative falls apart when we look at the sequence of events and examine the actions of both Gates and Crowley based on the information each had on hand at the time.
(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
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