On March 27th of this year, Will Smith physically struck a presenter at the Academy Awards in front of a live televised audience and with the whole world watching. Over a joke made in bad taste concerning his wife.
The police were not called. No criminal charges filed against him for the assault committed on live television.
His punishment? A “ten-year ban” from all Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences events. A ban made meaningless by his “resignation” from said Academy.
In all honesty, he should have been charged with assault. Not that, but he should be kicked out of the Screen Actors Guild, the union that everyone must join in order to make mainstream movies or TV shows. Let him keep the Oscar as a reminder of what he used to have but his film career should have ended that night.
This was not some disagreement made behind-the-scenes. This was a physical assault that took place in front of cameras during the most-watched event of the whole motion picture industry. I don’t care how “big” you are. If it was Marlon Brando, or Al Pacino, or Heath Ledger, or Carrot Top, I’d still be demanding that person go to jail on the spot.
But that didn’t happen to Will Smith. Because Will Smith is a major movie and music star who, not long after his criminal act, ended up winning the Best Actor award. Indeed, his colleagues coddled him instead of chiding him. He would later go out to celebrate, laughing with his family over the night’s events.
Simply put, Will Smith is “too big for jail”, just like bank executives, corporate executives, certain professional athletes, and politicians.
His criminal activity took place just hours before my article about the rising belligerence would go online, putting a punctuation to what I had said two weeks ago about how we have become increasingly hostile to one another. The fact that he is allowed to get away with what he did, while the victim of his assault is still paying the price for it, shows the rampant injustice going on in the world.
Yes, Vladimir Putin is waging war on Ukraine and his propaganda machines both in Russia and the United States are spreading this lie that he’s somehow the “victim” of the gross crimes and violent atrocities being committed there. Yes, there are calls for him to be tried in the World Court for crimes against humanity, but unless he finds himself removed from power by his own people and magically spirited to the Hague, those calls will be meaningless.
And, no, the United States cannot give Ukraine the help they really need, because to do so would be a provocation for global thermonuclear annihilation. We can’t go in like we did with Iraq and Afghanistan because those countries did not have nuclear weapons that could destroy the world countless times over, and Russia still does. And the only people who are calling for that are Putin and the evangelicals here in the United States.
Meanwhile there are three people that have been referred to the Department of Justice by the January 6th Commission for failing to heed a congressional subpoena. But the lily-livered yellow-bellied Attorney General refuses to act on those referrals and arrest those three people like he did with mad monk Steve Bannon. Oh, AG Merrick Garland has no problems going after the little guys who stormed the Capitol, but he’s the Coward of the Country when it comes to the higher-ups. Speaking of which, those little guys all seem to get off with light sentences for their acts of sedition and assault.
It is said that a certain narcissist who used to be the President of the United States has “likely” committed crimes when he tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. This matches what certain members of the January 6th Commission have said on the subject and that they could bring up actual criminal charges. Then again, that would also fall on the lap of AG Garland, the Coward of the Country, to follow through with actual indictments and the arrest of said narcissist. The same person who has failed to act on the charges outlined in the Mueller Report from 2019 that could be filed now that said narcissist is no longer in office.
Let’s get brutally honest here... there is rampant injustice going on, not just in the United States but pretty much around the world. We claim that America is a “nation of laws, not men”, and yet we have certain people and a certain political party wrapped around a certain narcissist, that firmly believe that “only they” can run the country. We say that “no one is above the law”, but we have demonstrated quite well that certain people and certain groups are, in fact, beyond reproach and above the law. They are not charged with their crimes. They are not held to account for their actions. They do what they do repeatedly, and they get away with it repeatedly, because they are considered “too big”. As if the whole universe will come crashing down in flames if they dare be held to account for their actions like the common riffraff. Well, with Vlad Putin, yeah, that could actually happen.
In all honesty, there is a part of me that wouldn’t tolerate what happened to Chris Rock – the comedian and Academy presenter who was assaulted by Will Smith on live TV – if I were in his shoes. Like him, I was a victim of bullies. Like him, I also have a problem sometimes with social awareness. People would like to believe that Chris was the “better man” for just taking the assault and not pressing charges. I see it as just another bully preying on someone who was already subject to bullies. Another injustice that will go unanswered, and another criminal who got away with his crime.
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