Dr. Ben Carson Wants You All To Be Civil About The Baltimore Police Nearly Severing A Man's Spine

Prior to Dr. Ben Carson officially climbing into the GOP primary clown car on May 4, he is opening his yap hole to share with us some of his most excellent thoughts on the riots in Baltimore, the city where he lived for 36 years tinkering with brains that he swears, despite all available evidence, were not his own. Too bad Dr. Carson isn’t a spinal surgeon who could come out of retirement to try and help Freddie Gray after the Baltimore police NEARLY SEVERED THE MAN’S SPINE, but hey, omelets, eggs, what are you going to do.

First Dr. Carson took to the pages of Facebook with a statement. 

[I]t is very sad and unfortunate to see the destruction taking place by irresponsible individuals. It is vital to remember that the best way to create positive change is through peaceful conversation and policy ideas that display a commitment to resolution.

Yes, it is very sad that the irresponsible cops killed Freddie Gray when they NEARLY SEVERED THE MAN’S SPINE. Perhaps one policy idea we could peacefully suggest to help resolve the situation is to calmly explain to the Baltimore police that they should be careful to not kill a handcuffed suspect in the back of a police van by giving him a ride rough enough to send him careening around and NEARLY SEVERING HIS SPINE. That would be a good start.

I urge parents, grandparents and guardians to please take control of your children and do not allow them to be exposed to the dangers of uncontrolled agitators on the streets.

Not the fathers, of course, because as Rand Paul already explained, kids in Baltimore don’t have any. This mother is taking Dr. Carson’s advice, though. Bet that kid is going to bed without supper.

Carson also spoke to Jason Zengerle at GQ , and had more Smart Thoughts about how poorly people have reacted to the police in Baltimore killing a man by NEARLY SEVERING HIS GODDAMN SPINE.

I spent 36 years in Baltimore and had a lot of interactions with the police there, in the emergency rooms and lots of other places, and the vast majority are wonderful, very fine people. You certainly can't characterize all policemen by what happens in an incident like this.

We’re betting the vast majority of the thousands of protestors are also wonderful, fine people, and we hope they will receive the benefit of the doubt even though a small minority of them started looting. Oops! Too late! 

Perhaps something bad was done. I don't think there's any way it's going to be swept under the rug.

Pardon us, Dr. Carson, but you know that Baltimore is in America, right? If the cops had limited their injuries of Freddie Gray to, say, merely a broken leg instead of NEARLY SEVERING THE MAN’S SPINE, it probably would have gotten swept under the rug unless Gray found a really good lawyer. Now there will have to be a full investigation. THEN it can get swept under the rug.

But the larger issue here is, how do you react when something is wrong? If you have an unpleasant experience with a plumber, do you go out and declare a war on all plumbers? Or teachers or doctors? Of course not. And it makes no sense to do that with police either.

The difference being that A) plumbers are not uniformed representatives of the state delivering what amounts to state-sanctioned violence against a minority population resulting in them NEARLY SEVERING A MAN’S SPINE, and B) if a small subset of plumbers were committing acts of violence that resulted in the plumbers’ union having to pay millions of dollars in legal settlements to its victims, at some point the union might boot those guys out because they are making all plumbers look bad, don’t you think?

As for the teachers, we haven’t seen it yet but we’re sure somewhere there are wingnuts blaming the riots on the poor job teachers are doing in Baltimore’s underfunded public schools...oh wait, there we go. Anyway, no matter how bad a job public school teachers might be doing, to our knowledge none has ever punished a kid for not doing his algebra homework by NEARLY SEVERING HIS SPINE. Really, we can’t stress that part enough.

Clearly the only way that you're ever going to resolve grievances is to engage in conversations, civil conversations. Laying out what your grievances are, what your perception is of what the other side is doing, and having each side do that, and very often when you're having those kinds of discussions, you're able to see that you're not as far apart from each other as you actually think you are.

This avuncular bedside manner might have worked wonders in calming nervous patients, but it’s unsophisticated horseshit when it comes to the current situation in Baltimore. Dr. Carson really needs to read some Ta-Nehisi Coates, assuming his own brain isn’t too broken to understand it.

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