Hannah and Al

The story of the University of Virginia student Hannah Graham, missing several days and subject to a major search effort, is all over the news.  We all pray that she will return, alive and well, to her family and friends, although the circumstances of her disappearance suggest otherwise.  She was last seen in the company of a rather scary-looking fellow who has been charged in her disappearance and is, as I write this, on the lam.

Where is Al Sharpton?  Surely Hannah Graham is perceived, at least for the moment, far, far more an innocent victim than the convenience-store robber and police assailant whom Mr. Sharpton tried to gain sympathy for after he was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri.  Al is nowhere to be seen, and I wonder about what must be going through his mind, including what side to come down upon.

What indeed does go through the mind of someone who is far more charlatan than civil rights advocate?  To have pursued the whole Tawana Brawley matter even after a grand jury came down with a "nothing happened" finding is nothing short of corrupt; that he allowed others such as Johnnie Cochran to pay the subsequent legal settlement against him is equally corrupt.

So is Al sitting in his paid-for-by-someone-else living room trying to decide whether to show sympathy for the missing girl, or to head straight to Charlottesville and claim that the accused kidnapper is a "gentle giant" who wouldn't hurt a flea and is being accused only because of his race, race card race card race card ...

How does he pick his battles?  He can't possibly believe that anything happened to Tawana Brawley other than what she did to herself -- after being found out in the cold and claiming to have been raped and exposed for three days, she was determined not only to have been not raped, but to have just brushed her teeth.  But Al still went after the accused-by-Brawley policeman.

So he is either completely morally bankrupt or completely self-deluded into thinking he is actually doing something good.  Given that he appears oblivious to facts (the grand jury finding, the video of Michael Brown robbing the convenience store, the positive drug tests on him during autopsy), and is equally oblivious to public opinion that opposes him, I suspect the former.

The Al Sharptons of the world will go away when their audience stops paying their bills for them.  It seems impossible that he is capable of saying the things he does in the face of the facts, until you look at the crowds who allow themselves to be convinced that he is right.  When will they ever learn, as the song goes.

If he is sitting now, deciding whether to jump to the defense of an accused kidnapper and inject race into the case, we wonder if all he is thinking about is who will pay his bills for him.  Those who gather in the audience when he speaks, wherever he comes down on in this case, will answer that question.

Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton