Hate Crimes and Karma

I don’t believe in karma.  I wish I did.  Karma is a law in Hinduism which claims that every act done, no matter how insignificant, will eventually return to the doer with equal impact.  You know, what goes around comes around.  Do bad and you’ll pay for it someday.  If I believed in karma, I’d believe that when 4 kids kick a Mexican to death on the streets of a town in Pennsylvania, they’d be punished.  But, as I said….

The verdict last week out of Shenandoah took the wind out of me.  I actually felt that acid taste at the base of my throat when I heard the news.  Almost immediately I remembered back to my days as a TV reporter and the people I met down in those counties 30 years ago.  Sad, bitter people who were losing their jobs as their main industry, coal, dried up.  They were empty, ignorant and hopeless.  I hated being among them. 

Fast forward to the present and suddenly the downtrodden have a target—foreigners.  And not just any foreigners, these interlopers were easy to spot.  They were brown.  They had accents.  So it was okay with the locals to make victims of the newcomers.  When it turned out that the one the kids kicked to death was an illegal immigrant, so much the better.  That’ll teach ’em, right?  They should never have come here, right?

That’s what the verdict showed.  The all-white jury decided that four against one really doesn’t add up to anything more than simple assault, never mind that the one--died.  That’s justice, old coal style.

I wasn’t in the courtroom of course, so I can’t be sure how good or bad a job the prosecution did in their efforts.  And perhaps the defense was spirited and inspired.  Perhaps.  But what probably happened was good old jury nullification.  No one was gonna tell these folks who was a killer.  And no one was gonna move to their town and take their jobs without a fight.  Well done, fear.  You’ve won another round.

The government has a solution to these cracker uprisings; they call them “civil rights violations.”  It’s shorthand for “hate crimes.”  The feds are now threatening to see if there are civil rights violations in the case.  They may go after the kids again in federal court.

Much as I want these monsters locked up, I’m not a big fan of the hate crime concept.  Basically, these crimes are based on bias.  The victims are victims because of what they are, be it gay, foreign, female, whatever.  Often times the punishments are enhanced in these circumstances.  I don’t like the notion that the government thinks it can guess what’s in my mind or anyone else’s mind, and then prove it.  If you want to punish the crime more severely, don’t try to read my mind for the justification, simply increase the sentence.        

There is no justice.  I believe that people get what they get, not what they deserve.  Some get more and some get less.  I don’t believe in karma either.  It’s just a bit too religious for me.  It gives shelter to the meek to think that their time will come in another life.  I don’t think their time will come and I don’t think justice will come.