Political Staffers, Facebook, and Crossing a Line.

A person puts something on his Facebook page for others to see. I understand that an errant post of a link to a story may not reflect a point of view. A series of posts on an incendiary topic, however, becomes a revealing pattern. Take a look at Senate Republican staffer Chris Diorio’s Facebook page. He is aggrieved by the attention paid to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Somehow that attention it has garnered, Diorio seems to feel, diminishes the killings of others. He highlights the gruesome killing of a Kentucky couple. The perpetrators were brought to justice. Next up is the shooting of a Mississippi State University student on campus Saturday night. The student appears to have been near a drug deal gone bad. Two of three suspects have been arrested and charged with capital felonies.

In Kentucky, the guilty were black, the victims white. In Mississippi, the victim was white and the suspects black. They have nothing to do with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. For many reasons, crimes garner different levels of attention and interest. Law enforcement in those two cases, it ought to be noted, pursued the perpetrators with the vigor we expect. No one could say that of the Martin case. When three members of the Petit family of Cheshire were murdered in a home invasion in the summer of 2007, some malignant observers complained that that crime received national attention because the victims were white. They were wrong.Those, like Senate Republican staffer Diorio, who are in a frenzy because the nation has turned its eyes on Sanford, Florida seem angry not because a young man was killed but because much of the nation is wants to see justice done in the death of a Florida black man.

When you feature your Senate Republican colleagues and other political candidates on your Facebook page, readers will begin to assume that they share some of your ugly prism on the world. They ought to find ways to make it clear that they do not.