(Wikimedia CC; click to enlarge)
Robert LaVoy Finicum, a rancher from Arizona and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was killed in Oregon the other day by federal and local law enforcement personnel.
I can’t really speak to the specific merits of the protest in which he and others engaged, nor can I comment on the circumstances of his death. I expect and trust that there will be an investigation.
I’ll say this, though:
When, as they often do, our inner cities erupt in violence against the police, shopkeepers, and others, prominent voices in the media regularly exhort us to try to sympathetically understand where the violence comes from. What are the grievances of those who are pillaging stores and attacking law enforcement?
That’s probably not altogether bad advice, though it often seems to me an attempt to excuse merely criminal behavior. There’s no doubt, though, that family, political, and social pathologies are at work in such cases, and that they need urgent attention.
It would be appropriate, however, if those same voices could encourage Americans to make a sympathetic attempt to understand what grievances, real or perceived, led a devout 55-year-old rancher and foster father of eleven children (with others of similar backgrounds) to undertake a protest that had not turned violent until the encounter in which, sadly, he died.
I’m saddened by this story because I know men who, I’m guessing, are not very different from Robert LaVoy Finicum. Men from the same general area. I like them. I’m related to several of them. They’re good, solid, salt-of-the-earth, self-reliant, productive, dependable, patriotic. When I saw photos of LaVoy Finicum, I could imagine his voice. I’ve heard such voices all my life. And, as it happens, I’ve seen comments from people whom I know who knew him, and who report him to have been a good and kind man.
This is deeply, deeply sad.
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