Come on folks, stop acting STUPIDLY!

President Obama defended his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., by saying the "Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof he was in own home."  I see nothing wrong or improper about such logic, do you? 

The fact is that the police officer did arrest a man who was committing no crime (becoming righteously incensed is not a crime is it?) and posed no threat (a senior citizen, 5’7” who needs a cane to walk), who’d just arrived from China (don’t you hate it when you get home, jet lagged, dehydrated and exhausted from flying two days straight?) only to find his front door jammed shut (don't you despise those old wood doors that expand with heat and humidity and get stuck when you least expect it?)

The President should have no opinion about his friend’s arrest? Come on!  He’s a human being, just like us, and he also knows firsthand what racism is like. So what if he has the nerve to call it like it is.

Now the young Boston cop has a bruised ego, and his boss the Cambridge Police Chief is defending his young buck, an eleven year veteran of the Cambridge Police Department, who by the way, also trains other cops on race relations!  Police unions are joining the fray and crying foul. They all demand an apology from the United States Chief Executive.  They think the President should know better.  He should refrain from using the word “stupidly”, such offensive language, and we all know that words carry consequences.  

Speaking of consequences, I hope this overblown debacle serves to shine a bright light on police training across the USA, forcing them to examine things like deflating conflict, not stupidly escalating it.  What a novel idea.

Perhaps Professor Gates’ behavior was self righteous and aggressive, but if I were in his shoes, I might have lost it myself.  If a cop ordered me to step outside my own home AFTER I proved to him that I did nothing wrong I might get a bit peeved, even if I didn’t just step off a plane from China and found my front door jammed.   Obama called it just right.  So instead of blowing this thing out of proportion, let’s use it to prevent incidents such as this in the future. Oh, and let’s just get along, ok? Respect cuts both ways.