Crimes are not mistakes

To clarify a point that has been bothering me all day: if you go 45 in a 30 because your mind wanders, you’ve made a mistake. If you walk out of the store without paying for something because it stuck inside the cart, you’ve made a mistake. If you willfully, intentionally, and deliberately commit criminal actions for six years, you are a criminal. You haven’t made a mistake. You’ve committed a crime.

Regardless of society’s injustices toward African American men (they are many, and they egregious), regardless of how many people get away with worse crimes, regardless of how someone might have been treated if they were white, this fact remains: when you MEAN to do something wrong, something you KNOW is wrong, something so bad that you feel the need to consistently lie about doing it, you aren’t making mistakes. If you want to ‘fess up to a crime, call it a crime. Don’t call it a mistake. It isn’t. Everyone makes mistakes. Not everyone commits crimes.

I refuse to feel sorry for rich fools of any race when they get what’s coming to them. I save my pity for those who never had a chance. I feel for the kid who gets sucked into a gang at 12. I feel for the kids who can’t afford books and paper to study with. I spend my life working with people who never had a chance. I live with them. I fight for them. I cry for them. I do what I can to give them a chance. I spend my liberal angst on the poor. Don’t ask me to feel sorry for Mike Vick. I can’t do it. I don’t feel sorry for multimillionaires who do dumbass things and then beg for the mercy of society. I’m sorry. I don’t.