Posted by Jay Livingston
You have probably by now heard about the teenagers in Cocoa, Florida who taunted a drowning man rather than trying to save him or get help. They even made a video of the event.
| In the clip, the teens can be heard in the video heckling Dunn as he fights to stay above the water. In between bursts of laughter, one of the kids behind the camera can be heard shouting: “Yeah b---- you shoulda never got in there!” Another says, “Let him drown, what the heck.” [NBC ] |
Law enforcement is trying to figure out some crime to charge them with. In Florida, there’s no law against letting someone drown.
The police chief says that they were “utterly inhumane and cruel.” And he is hardly alone in that reaction. The kids were young and Black, and they had been smoking weed.
The attitudes of the teenagers had a familiar ring. Six years earlier, also in Florida, several Republican presidential candidates were on stage in Orlando for a debate sponsored by Fox News. It was called “The Tea Party Debate.” The tickets were distributed so as to assure that much of the audience would be Tea Party supporters.
At one point, Wolf Blitzer posed this hypothetical to Rand Paul: a 30-year old man who has chosen not to buy insurance gets in an accident and will die without medical treatment. “Should we let him die?” Blitzer asks.
Paul starts to say no, but before he can, several people in the audience enthusiastically shout “Yes.”
I don’t recall whether there was a national outcry about the Tea Partiers in the audience being “utterly inhumane and cruel.” Their basic premise is the same as that of the Cocoa teenagers – “You shoulda never got in there” and therefore we have no obligation to save you. And both groups of males obviously enjoy the idea of letting the man die. But the older White men of the Tea Party seem to have something the boys lack – moral self-righteousness.
It was the same moral self-righteousness that inspired Republicans just a few days before the Florida debate when Brian Williams was asking Rick Perry, governor of Texas, about the 234 executions he had signed off on. When Williams mentioned that number, the crowd interrupted the question with cheers and applause. (A blog post with a video clip is here.)
So far, no Tea Party or Freedom Caucus spokesperson has issued an official statement about the Florida teenagers. It’s a tough call, I guess.
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