An open letter to the city of Cleveland I felt needed to be wrote

Easier Read

For many years I always thought of your city as “a losing city” due to its unfortunate struggle with putting together a winning professional sports team. Luckily the Cavs turned my opinion and even had me cheering for you in the finals last year. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to consider Cleveland a “city” anymore, and it isn’t due to sports.

What is a city? Aside from technicalities and a dictionary definition, what is a city? My answer to that is simply a community, diverse and interconnected through a system built on trust, respect for one another and civil governance. On Wednesday, you showed that your city only checks off “diverse”, and (barely covers) “community”. Tamir Rice was shot and killed fifteen months ago, and after clearing a police officer of what would be considered murder by any other person, you have the audacity to send a $500.00 ambulance fee to the Rice family.

Add on top of that, the fact that even the Police Union even thought your actions were disgraceful. That should carry more than its weight in shame, having come from a group who fought for the officers who murdered a twelve year old child to be cleared of all charges. Let that weigh on your conscious for a moment. This is a group of people who are by and large are considered a disgrace to racial equality across the nation.

The sad part is that the murder of a child who was still young enough to be playing with toys, by men who are supposed to be “honored and respected for putting their lives on the line”, is so common place in our society that we forgot about this horror until a fine imposed caught our attention again.

The Mayor, who I will not name, and the rest of Cleveland’s murder-moderate council even had claimed in its own report that the death may have been Tamirs’ own fault due to his failure “to exercise due care to avoid injury”. As a person who was once twelve years old, I can tell you from personal experience that not a single one of my friends at the time “exercised due care to avoid injury” anywhere except in school, and most of us would still run in the halls and throw snowballs. Outside of the school we were children. Drivers had to give way to us, adults had to watch us on the playground while their younger kids played, cops with guns that shoot a metal projectile with enough power to take a life had to keep their trigger-fingers in control.

We were young, infatuated with wonder and curiosity, inconsiderate of consequences, cared only about when we could play outside and if our parents would let us have a sleepover. One child was robbed of that unexplainable beauty, and as a governing body you felt like you had to “Add insult to homicide.” As Subodh Chandra put it.

My only question to you, the city government, is how morally bankrupt can you be to act so despicable? How do you rest at night, knowing that your actions will cause unspeakable pain, outrage, and humiliation to a family that cannot do anything to respond except use words against bullets, bills, and bullsh*t? I hope you don’t have an answer for me on that.

As my final thought, I would like to offer you some advice that I hope you heed. Do not pretend to be sorry. Do not act as if you are embarrassed. Do not pawn this as “the legal process” we all know to be a hypocrisy of Clintonesque proportions. Instead just wait out your terms and proceed as if you have no soul, no conscious, no morals to live by. Because as you will come to see, tens of millions of citizens are more ashamed and disgraced by your actions then you could ever hope to pretend to be.

/r/POLITIC Thread