The blame game in Kirkwood Missouri

Charles (cookie) Thornton went from being an angry thorn in the side of the kirkwood City Council, to a cold blooded , methodical killer in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Lives were lost, others irrevocably changed forever, and a town was torn apart. Make no mistake, there is no justification for what happened. Thornton's brother has made statements which condone and attempt to justify the atrocity committed by his brother. People are outraged and incredulous over his remarks, and rightly so.


As with any violent act committed by a person whose race differs from that of the victim, accusations of racism are flying from both sides of the equation. Thortons brother, family members and some members of the black community in Kirkwood maintain that Thornton was singled out and targeted because he was black. His brother has gone so far to say that the senseless killings were justified , and a retaliatory action in an on going war. Thornton also raised the issue of race, suggesting that African Americans have a more difficult time exerting their rights and that his brother’s race was a factor in his difficulties with the city and in the courts.


You have only to google any combination of search words including Kirkwood, and you will quickly see the other side of the coin. There is no shortage of backwards thinking white race baiters who have jumped on the bandwagon to decry the racially motivated attack of a black man against innocent white people. Here are a couple of examples. Let's not confuse those racist rants from white backwoods rednecks or the idiotic ramblings of the killers brother , as true reflections from mainstream whites or blacks. Race doesn't matter to the main characters in this tragedy.


The fact is that race was irrelevant to the people who mattered most. The victims never stopped to consider the color of their killer. I'm sure dying at the hands a white man would be no less terrifying than it was at the hands of a black man. I doubt the last thoughts going through their minds was Thornton's skin color. The only thing any of the victims cared about or thought of, was how to avoid dying. As for Thorton, it didn't matter to him what color the victims were, in the end the only color he saw was red from a volatile cocktail of insanity and an all consuming urge to kill.


In the days and weeks to come, race will be a main topic regarding the killings in Kirkwood. The media will help fan the flames, people like Nancy Grace will feed on the sensationalism and fuel the fire a little more. The white camp will say " Look, it's another case of black on white crime."


The black camp will raise up and cry "The cards are stacked against the Black man, he was driven to it ."Sadly there is a little truth to both of those statements. But race is only an inconsequential portion of the whole truth of this tragedy. Like the layers of an onion, race is just the outer skin , just a layer or two of this onion of truth.


The truth is both the killer and victims may or not have been racist. That small town city council, may or may not have singled Thorton out, race may have or not played a role. Thorton might have hated white people, or he might just as well have hated people in general. What is certain is that none of the people who could definitively answer how much of a role race played, will ever get the chance. They are just as dead as they can be, and the whole truth of the matter has gone to the grave with them. Whatever loose wiring in Thornton's brain that allowed him to kill defenseless people, was as nondiscriminatory as the bullets that came from his gun. And whatever wrongs Thorton felt had been committed against him cant justify taking a human life, none of the victims did anything to deserve killing.


The curtain has closed on the first act of this tragedy. The main characters have left the stage, never to return. The second and final act will be comprised of those left reeling in the wake of the killings. The town itself will never be the same. Kirkwood will be separated by a racial divide, antagonists from both sides, white and black, will further widen the gap. Rather than come together to mourn, they will mourn separated by skin color, each side blaming the other.


When dealing with the inexplicable we grasp for someone or something to blame. We need a bad guy, someone to point an accusatory finger at. The one true bad guy in all of this is dead and gone.
There isn't much satisfaction or relief in laying all of the blame at the feet of a dead man. So people in Kirkwood and across America, will blame each other. Race will inevitably be the main theme running throughout the blame game, it always is in cases like this. We like to think we have progressed beyond this type of backward thinking, but we haven't, not really. Even the most liberal and forward thinking of us, still has at least a few remaining vestiges of it embedded deep in our psyche. Whether we admit it or not.


In the end there is one twisted bit of irony in all of this. The black killer and the white victims, have gotten past the issues of race, to them race isn't an issue. They are all equally dead. The only winners in this sad tale are the white racists who will blame the incident on an entire race, and the black racists who will do likewise. The one person who is really to blame doesn't care anymore.