Learning from week’s news not very easy

What a sad week. So much has happened, and what have we learned?

For the week’s biggest lessons, let’s go back to college. Where should we start?

How about at Duke University, with the lacrosse players accused of rape? Exonerated but bitter, they appeared on “60 Minutes” to discuss the injustice they endured. Poor kids: I feel for them and their families.

But what did we learn? Did we learn that white kids too can have their futures ripped from their hands, just as easily as black kids can? That white kids get unjustly convicted, thrown in jail and raped themselves just as easily as black kids do? Nope, we didn’t learn that at all.

You see the white kids from Duke weren’t convicted. Yeah, they went on one hell of a nasty ride, but the truth prevailed. They got reinstated at college and offered jobs. They even discussed the gross unfairness of a vengeful and self-aggrandizing district attorney on national television.

Statistically that wouldn’t have happened if they had been black guys.

According to the American Bar Association, “blacks are more likely than whites to be wrongfully convicted of capital crimes and the probability of wrongful conviction of blacks occurs disproportionately to their representation in the U.S. population.”

In fact, the American Bar Association conducted a study of prisoners cleared by DNA evidence. The sample of folks doing time for crimes they didn’t commit was 29 percent white and a whopping 57 percent black. Gee, that sounds like a raw deal: But all things being equal, we probably could consider it within the margin of error.

But all things aren’t equal. The 2005 U.S. Census count has the U.S. population at 80 percent white and only 12.8 percent black.

That means, in a colorblind society, 80 percent of those wrongfully convicted would have been white.

This brings us to the next lesson of the week:

Our country doesn’t just ignore racism, it embraces it. To support this theory, let’s go to Rutgers University and watch some women’s basketball.

I’m happy to tell you that Don Imus’ First Amendment rights are still intact, only now he gets to use them like most people, standing on a street corner holding up a sign, not putrefying our public airwaves as licensed to CBS and MSNBC.

And those beautiful athletes who spent their youth staying away from drugs and disciplining their minds and bodies into excellence (which is far more than can be said for Don Imus at their age): Those young women say they will forgive him.

Well, good for them. I won’t.

Actually, I’m wondering how we can get the rest of the hatred-spewing, slanderous, contemptible, angry talk show hosts fired, too. Nothing would make me happier than to see Coulter and Savage and Limbaugh standing on that street corner next to Imus waving their placards in the air, trying to get somebody to give a damn about what they think.

But they won’t get fired because, sadly, we live in a bigoted country. An estimated 3 million people listened to Imus on more than 70 stations around the country. We’re bigots all right: the good old-fashioned kind. The kind that say or listen to abhorrent loathsome things and then say we were only kidding. Just like Imus.

And now we’ve come to lesson No. 3.

A gunman on the campus of Virginia Tech started killing people in what The Washington Post called “the deadliest shootings in United States history” (unless you count the Indian massacres, but we don’t, see Lesson 2).

And what has this taught us?

Nothing.

At least not yet.

It could teach us that wrongly imprisoning anyone, regardless of race, doesn’t help keep us safe. We could learn that while we waste valuable police time and court time chasing down the wrong people – white kids from Duke or black kids from Howard – that a gunman can walk freely through a campus killing people.

It could teach us that racism and misogyny just fuel more hatred. That a country tuned in every day to angry people defaming others doesn’t help us build a better society. On the contrary, it blinds us to our ills.

Pat LaMarche, a former Green candidate for governor and for vice president, can be contacted at PatLaMarche@hotmail.

com.