Reading the newspaper Sunday is sometimes like treading quicksand. One used to be able to rely on AP reporters for absolute correctness of word usage. Lately it is not so.
I have found simple slips such as "alleged shooting" and "alleged gun". Either there was a shooting or there was not and it was carried out with a gun. What kind of gun is the question, not if it was a gun or not.
Sometimes the way people use words brings a smile to my face, and other times I just have to grimace and mentally stop from inserting commas or removing them. Grammaticals haven't been a major peeve of mine, but grammatically incorrect verbiage is the clog in story flow for me.
Such is the AP story in yesterday's paper by Holbrook Mohr (usually a very good wordsmith and grammatician--aren't you impressed by all these made up words?). The FBI is investigating the alleged murder by pickup truck incident in Jackson, MS to discover whether the murder of the black man was an infringement of his civil rights by the white teenager driving the truck.
Really? I believe that anyone who takes the life of another is infringing upon that person's civil rights. We have the inalienable right to live given to us by God Himself since He did create us, knitting our most intimate inwards parts together within our mothers' wombs. Of course, I understand the civil right Mohr is referring to is the Hate Crimes Act. However, it seems to me that murder is a most uncivil act regardless of the legal definition of civil right.
We should always remember that Jesus said if we harbor anger against a brother we are guilty of murder. Anger of the unrighteous kind is also an uncivil act of the mental kind.
If we could only let people be people in this world... If we could only pursue happiness instead of trying to scrub out another's happiness... If we could just try to love our neighbors as ourselves, what a different world we would inhabit.
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