Do the cameras that now surround us, helping governments keep continual track of our lives, also offer a benefit? Can they help educate us, show us a reality obscured too long by fears created for us by the elites and their media? Might they help us liberate ourselves from prejudice, and overcome our susceptibility to the divide-and-rule policies that keep us weak?

I don’t have the answer, but these thoughts were prompted by this footage of two police officers arriving at a wintry Cleveland park and shooting dead a 12-year-old boy for holding a toy gun. No one is near, or seemingly at risk from the boy with his pretend weapon.

The police, however, do not hold back. They do not park their vehicle some distance away, taking shelter behind the car’s metal body, while they warn their suspect to put his gun down. No, they race fearlessly right up to him in their car, get out and shoot him on the spot.

Not even the size of him, a little man pretending in his hoodie to be the grown-up he isn’t yet, seems to throw them, give them pause.

He is black and he has a gun. So his life must be forfeited.

UPDATE:

It should be noted that this video was released by the police, as part of their campaign to prove the two officers acted judiciously. That’s why you can see a red circle around the gun every time the boy raises it, as if confirmation that he deserved to die. The Washington Post reported that one of the officers radioed after the shooting: “Shots fired, male down, um, black male, maybe 20.” It seems that not only did the two officers choose to see what they wanted to see, but their own force sees the very same things in the video. Unlike them, are we capable of seeing what the video really shows?