It’s not law and order to shoot a man seven times in the back.
It’s not law and order when a 17-year-old boy grabs an assault rifle and crosses state lines.
It’s not law and order when that 17-year-old boy shoots three people and two of them die.
It wasn’t law and order when George Floyd’s last breath was pushed out of his body on a street in Minneapolis.
It wasn’t law and order for vigilantes to chase Ahmaud Arbery through their Georgia neighborhood, corner him and gun him down.
It wasn’t law and order for police officers to shoot Breonna Taylor eight times while attempting to serve a no-knock warrant on her Kentucky apartment.
It wasn’t law and order when officers shot Botham Jean in his own home and Atatiana Jefferson in her own home.
It wasn’t law and order when police threw Eastern Illinois University student Jaylan Butler to the ground and threatened to blow off his young, perfect head when his swim team bus was stopped at a rest stop.
In each of those tragedies, order was disrupted. Public trust was disrupted. Humanity was disrupted.
In each of those tragedies, the legal specifics vary. The officer who shot Jefferson was indicted for murder. The officer who shot Jean was convicted of murder. The officers involved in Taylor’s shooting have not been arrested. The public still awaits more details surrounding police officer Rusten Sheskey shooting Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin; officers on that scene weren’t wearing body cameras.
But we know that in the United States, no person should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. It’s in our Constitution. Twice. In the Fifth Amendment, as it applies to the federal government and in the 14th Amendment as it applies to states.
No person.
So when Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Kyle Rittenhouse — now charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, attempted first-degree intentional homicide and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 — “decided to maintain order when no one else would,” we have to ask ourselves how “order” is being defined for us.
Carlson has the highest-rated program in cable news. That’s an enormous platform from which to explain away alleged homicide as maintaining order.
When President Donald Trump accepts the GOP nomination at the Republican National Convention — from the South Lawn of the White House, which itself violates the law — and says, “We must always have law and order,” we have to ask ourselves which laws he wants upheld, and what order looks like to him.
When Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short called NBA teams “absurd” and “silly” for refusing to participate in playoff games this week, when he told CNN, “If they want to protest, I don’t think we care,” we have to ask why.
Why not care? Why not take an honest, expansive, open-minded view at the protests swirling around us — many peaceful, some not — and the events that lead up to them? Why not examine the pain and the death and the grieving and the injustice that send your fellow Americans, the ones you’re elected to serve, into the streets to call for concrete, widespread change?
A call for maintaining law and order, without the acknowledgment that neither is applied fairly and equally in this country, is little more than a call for maintaining the status quo. And the status quo has left far too many people out of America’s promise of equal protection, equal rights, equal opportunity.
Correcting that won’t be easy or fast or orderly. But it’s necessary. And overdue.
When former President Barack Obama gave his eulogy at civil rights leader John Lewis’ funeral, he closed with this:
“God bless you all. God bless America. God bless this gentle soul who pulled it closer to its promise.”
That work isn’t done. That work is all of ours.
Heidi Stevens is a lifestyle columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
