Quote of the Day:
“I think it’s beautiful,” the manager of Oakland restaurant Forge told the Los Angeles Times, responding to Sunday’s events. “It’s a message that needs to be heard, and if they have to disrupt business and daily life for a minute, then I’m glad we could help.”
–an Oakland, California restaurant manager on how beautiful it is to have Sunday brunch invaded by anti-police protesters
Generally restaurant managers don’t like to have their peak brunch time grind to a halt while an intimidating mob harangues the Eggs Benedict crowd. But Black Brunch is either so cool or so scary (you get to pick which one) that even the victims love it. In saner parts of the nation saner than New York or San Francisco, Black Brunch might not be as cool.
Ian Tuttle writes:
Left-wingers can be about as flamboyant as they please when protesting in Manhattan or the Bay Area, and they know it. There is a reason they are not staging their performance art at barbecue joints at dinnertime in Fort Worth: namely, they would not make it through the door — not because the diners are racist brutes, but because the only dinner-and-show they are interested in is the one they paid for.
And in parts of the country not governed by Oberlin graduates, people are sensible enough to refuse the premise of such spectacles, which is that the racial climate of present-day America is no different than that of 1950s-era Montgomery. But it is. Black Brunch is not a modern-day sit-in, because brunch establishments are not modern-day whites-only diners.
The brunch invasion, so different from the courageous sit-in movement that began in the 1950s and heralded the civil rights movement, is somehow perfect for today. The word epigone springs to mind for these unworthy descendents of the real civil rights movement. But the brunch invaders, who spout false information about the police, aren’t the only ones who are being less than candid just now.
Whatever you think of the decision by a goodly number of police officers to turn their backs on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio while he was speaking at the funeral of murdered NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu, you have to be disgusted that the mayor is hiding behind the family of the slain officer. Mr. de Blasio says that the back turning is an insult to the Liu family, when he knows full well that no insult was intended to the family but that, rightly or wrongly, he was being criticized.
Instead of owning up, the mayor does what he has always done: attack members of the NYPD. He knows that, regardless of which way they were facing, the officers were there to honor the Liu family. To say they dishonored the family is not true. Shame on Mayor de Blasio for hiding behind the Liu family.
It goes without saying (though in this era of constant liberal slurs one must constantly state the obvious) that overly aggressive—or worse—behavior by the police must be rectified. But behind de Blasio’s cravenness and the Black Brunch crowd’s radical chic update, there is a call for chaos and a serious denigration of an institution that protects all of us, regardless of our race.
New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin describes the police and the U.S. military as “our angels in a time of danger and cynicism.” He writes:
The military and the NYPD are made up of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, day after day, quietly, without seeking the limelight or acclaim. They do what they do because it is right.
That is absolute majesty.
May 2015 bring us more of it.
Compare the police, who are being attacked verbally and otherwise, to the beautiful brioche brigades, and you’ll realize that there is something seriously amiss with us today.