Cry Me a River - by I P Daily

If I hear about one more so-called societal injustice, I truly believe that blood will shoot from eyes, my head will explode, and orange light will glow from the remains of my neck.

I seem to recall from a very young age that there are consequences to my actions. That means, even as a youngster, I knew that if I pee'd my pants, I'd get in trouble - especially in church. Or, if I stole the neighbor kid's Matchbox car from his front porch and then told my parents I "found it" . . . "on the sidewalk" . . . "near uh Chris' house" . . . and then was taken to the kitchen table for interrogation and confessed to my crime under the threat of no snack and THEN had to walk all the way back down there, and ADMIT to my crime to Chris and his parents before I could get my snack, there was a consequence. Oddly, I still love chocolate chip cookies and will do almost anything for them. But I digress.

As a slightly more mature adult (there again, a topic of hot debate), I have discovered that life is a series of "If, Then" events. If I add 2 to 2, then I get 4. If I cheat on my wife, then I get in a crap load of trouble (set the house on fire, it's easier to deal with). If I rob a bank, then I get prosecuted. If I exceed the speed limit, then I get a citation. If I show up late to work, then I get some form of discipline. If I'm already in prison, then I'm expected to follow even more stringent rules. If I don't, then there are consequences.

So I am sick to freakin death of all this whining about the hoodlum who died at a juvenile boot camp. Somehow we have forgotten that it was because he was a CRIMINAL that he was there. We overlook the fact that he did not comply with instructions resulting in the rough handling. He was a punk on the streets and was being a punk in prison. Bottomline. Yeah, I'm sorry that he died - he didn't deserve death. But neither he nor his family should have cause to expect kid glove treatment. Boot camp is, after all, BOOT CAMP. His choice was get his act together now, or spend the rest of his life being a little prison bitch to some other gangsta twice his size.

Same with the Jena Six. I don't care if you're white, orange, green, brown, or purple. If you commit a crime and are legitimately convicted of it, then deal. Build a bridge and get over it. Adapt and overcome.

Maybe the boot camp guards were rough. That's their job. If they were there to babysit, the point to boot camp would be lost. Don't you just love how the media showed much younger school pictures AFTER he died?? His mug shots revealed a punk. Plain and simple. Not a cute, dimple-faced youngster.

There is this chronic cry for equality - racial and otherwise. Well, I posit that until the blacks stop making race an issue, it will remain one. Good luck finding a "whites only" college, scholarship, sorority, or advancement organization. That would be discriminatory. But by god, you can have a race-specific function for everyone else with absolute immunity. The closest thing whites have to a club is the motorcycle gang, the Outlaws, and they don't even like other whites.

It is high time society at large realized that there are two concepts that they must embrace: personal responsibility and common sense. Science taught us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The classic If/Then scenario is as real today as it was when I first learned how to program in BASIC on a TRS80. And it applies uniformly without regard to race, religion, gender, or socio-economic status.

Go therefore and take ownership of your actions and all that comes with them, good or bad. And if you don't like the results of your actions, you have only one person to fault. And to that, I toast you with a steaming hot mug of shut the %&^ up.