Published on: June 2, 2020 by Blair Haas
The purpose of this blog is to inform people about our electronic enclosures and to give guidance on issues that they may encounter in their search for the right product. My goal is to write a blog at least every two weeks and today I am due to write a new update. However, it is hard to focus on the best features of these great products at this time in our country’s history. I lived through the 60’s as a teenager and distinctly remember 1968 and all of the events that unfolded that year from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy to the riots protesting the Viet Nam war in Chicago at the Democratic Convention and through the country to protest racism. I also saw the Russians use the cover of the turmoil at the conventions and across America to crush the Prague Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia. As a teen who was just becoming politically aware, I had no real context for understanding the turmoil that must have shaken my parents and grandparents to see the foundation of their world feel like it was crumbling beneath them.
Today, as I look around, I think I am gaining a sense of their shock and confusion. Beginning in March, our lives were upended by the virus with a sense of fear and near panic over the unseen health risks that felt almost everywhere. Would you die by going to the grocery? Could hugging your grandchild be a death sentence? Yet even more soul shaking is the crisis that has gripped us over the last week. To watch as once, again, a black man received a death sentence for a potential minor crime of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. To recognize that this threat hangs over a large portion of our population daily with steady harassment ranging from higher traffic stops to death for minor offenses. I have enormous respect for most police who daily risk their lives to keep us safe. I also hope that it is a small minority who perpetrate these atrocities giving rise to their prejudices and feelings of inferiority. But 52 years after that horrible and frightening summer to continue to hear from friends that they are afraid for their sons to grow up because their lives don’t seem to matter, that a minor infraction will lead to their death, that they can’t walk in a park for fear that someone will accuse them of a crime for being black is just unacceptable.
I hope each of us, in our way, will try to step up and remember that we are all Americans. To me, the riots are a symptom, a cry for attention, and perhaps even an attempted distraction from the real issue which is the endemic racism that permeates our society and keeps us from being “the shining city on the hill.” I don’t have answers but I can only hope that being in the tech field, some of the devices that utilize our enclosures help keep us safe such as body cam video recorders to deter police abuse, and that my grandchildren will not someday be thinking of that time in 2020 when the world seemed to be collapsing around them and lament that lack of progress. This is the time and we cannot afford to wait any longer.
