I was asked on Monday by a friend if I was going to write about the goings-on at Yale. I will at some point, but now's not the time.

A little more than two and a half years ago, our school spent a day on lockdown after a twenty-one-year-old shot a police officer at MIT and drove through our campus on his way to Watertown, where he would eventually be captured by police.

We stayed in our dorms, not knowing whether he was just outside the door. He probably wasn't anywhere near campus, the rumors went, but better to keep the doors locked, just to be sure. I lived just next door to my friends, but I didn't dare to step outside for the ten seconds it would have taken me to get from my door to theirs.

I've written before about the moment that we raised our voices together, after the campus had begun to open up again, but I haven't said much about the terror of that day

King:

Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non­-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results.

But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to

(0)

This is not what I had in mind.

This is not at all what I had in mind when I wrote, two weeks ago:

Just once, couldn't someone pitch a "controversy" slow and over the plate, so I can opine against [X]ism and for the way in which good people have chosen to oppose it?

And yet...

...they're words which are stuck in my head.

(1a)

A week ago, William Murphy, Jr., an attorney representing the surviving family of Freddie Gray, released the statement:

On last Sunday morning at about

(1)

On the St. Louis Rams "Hands Up"

...joining in a common signal of solidarity, like that Hunger Games Katniss three-finger salute. Of course, obviously, the District Eleven residents who held up their hands like that were immediately attacked by the police, which is where our metaphor...uh...um...alright.

(related: Salon | Mockingjay's eerie echoes of Ferguson: Our real dystopian nightmare)

Larry Wilmore: "We're race-aholics. We'll always

Ore Babarinsa, one of my classmates, had the following to say on recent events in Ferguson, MO via Facebook. With permission, I've copied his words without modification below.

So, I've purposefully stayed off facebook for the last 12+ hours because I wanted to spend some time thinking about this whole mess because I specifically since I find so often that immediate outrage requires reflection before it can be distilled into meaningful wisdom.

Firstly, to address the immediate situation. There's a critical failure of justice, and the rule of law that has occurred. Once again, the forces of moral cowardice and systemic racism have won out over wisdom, fairness, and any sort of allegiance to due process. There's no working around that simple fact. The necessity of an open, public, and fair trial for Officer Wilson was paramount, and that the grand jury failed to acknowledge this is galling.

Secondly, the riots on the ground are understandable, and I'm not going to sit in my Harvard Ivory Tower and finger-wag at