Defacing Intelligent Discourse

The Asheville Fraternal Order of Police building

Monday's report by local North Carolina ABC affiliate station WLOS that an as-yet unnamed individual spray-painted 'Black Lives Matter' on the front exterior of the Asheville Fraternal Order of Police building is troubling.

It reflects the deep divisions resulting from the videotape of ex-APD officer Chris Hickman beating, tasing and choking Johnnie Rush last August after stopping him for jaywalking.

As WLOS reported, the defacing of the Asheville FOP building (pictured above) happened early Monday morning, and though the suspect also vandalized the windows of an AFOP van and attempted to disable security cameras, he was still caught on tape.

Local news affiliates who covered the story report that he appears to be a white guy wearing a hoodie.

According to local NC television affiliate WSPA, the AFOP president Rondell Lance told reporters that he'd personally already condemned the actions of Chris Hickman.

Lance also said he doesn't believe the building was defaced by anyone associated with the Asheville chapter of Black Lives Matter.

He believes it was someone with their own agenda trying to further fuel divisiveness.

Now as I write this on Thursday night, not a whole lot is known about this guy is; or why he did this.

A BLM protest in Minnesota in spring, 2015

But he clearly wasn't dispatched by Black Lives Matter to spray paint a police organization's building with the name of their organization.

According to their Webpage, the Black Lives Matter mission statement reads (in part): "The Black Lives Matter Global Network is a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."

The phony, one-dimensional descriptions of BLM peddled by opportunistic conservative ex-politician blowhards like Chris Christie and Fear Meister Rudy Giuliani, or the usual media suspects of quack, right-wing media like Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, demonize BLM as some kind of violent terrorist splinter cell.

But in reality BLM is actually about peaceful, non-violent dissent, organized community action and education -  not spray-painting police property in the dead of night.

As a lover of the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, I'm all for Freedom of Expression in all it's many forms.

But to me, defacing property with spray paint, or anything else for that matter, is just plain wrong.

And it's vandalism, like the kind we saw on the walls of schools, people's vehicles and homes in the days following Trump's election in November, 2016 - including the swastikas some right-wing derelict spray painted on the walls of my elementary school in Bethesda, Maryland.

Some of the thousands of students who walked out
of school to protest gun violence on Wednesday 

If someone wants to use writing to express their opposition about something, by all means put it on a sign, in an op-ed, book, magazine, social media platform or blog.

Hell, you can write on yourself (or your own property) if you want to, but to me it's just low-rent to deface public or private property with your own personal agenda.

If you want to protest something, engage in peaceful organized resistance like students across the U.S. did on Wednesday to advocate for stricter gun control laws.

There's little question that those students were, in part, inspired by the BLM-organized marches and protests that have taken place in cities and towns across America over the past four years - sparked by the outrage over the judicial system holding no one legally accountable for the unjustified killings of unarmed African-American teenagers Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and so many others.

BLM's membership (and supporters) is made up of people of all races, so my guess would be that the individual in the hoodie who defaced the AFOP building early Monday is more than likely someone trying to steer anger over the Chris Hickman videotape onto the BLM movement.

BLM had nothing to do with Chris Hickman harassing, beating, tasing and choking Johnnie Rush as he was walking home from his job washing dishes last August.

As writer and Huffington Post contributor Gennette Cordova observed on her Twitter feed yesterday, "Video surveillance has shown that a white person did this, which all black people knew when they initially saw this story."

Whoever spray painted that building tried to use a lie to stir up the divisiveness and hatred regularly cultivated by Trump - in doing so he defaced intelligent discourse on issues that are critical to the American people as a whole.

This morning's Washington Post article about Cadet Bonespurs having bragged to a crowd of Republican donors in Missouri Wednesday night that he intentionally lied to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the U.S. having a trade deficit with our neighbors to the north shows that the hoodie-guy in Asheville isn't the only one using a lie to sew division.

No doubt they both want to Make America Great Again.