Apparently, to make people forget about the Alton Sterling shooting…

To some extent one might forgive such inanities, coming as they are from the mouths of the bereaved. Emotionally wrecked people will tend to say some incredibly irrational things as they attempt to make sense of a tragedy, and the Sterling shooting was certainly tragic.

What’s not established is whether the tragedy in question is also an outrage, and a trier of fact (or several) will have to decide the question of whether Sterling’s own actions led Baton Rouge Police officer Blaine Salamoni to reasonably conclude he was going for the gun in his pocket while he was struggling with police as they attempted to arrest him.

That is, as it should be, a hotly debated question in Baton Rouge. Those who believe Sterling’s shooting was not justified want desperately to keep the debate going, though they seem to fail to understand that its venue now lies within the U.S. Justice Department, which is preparing a report which will either bring charges to Salamoni for the shooting, or will not.

What the Sterling clan and their allies want is more than that. They want political power arising from the shooting, which is why on Monday they issued a host of demands and called for a boycott of white-owned businesses in Baton Rouge until satisfaction is achieved. By appearances this had little result, because much of the momentum on Sterling’s behalf dried up first as the full facts of the case surfaced and second after an unhinged black nationalist from out of town killed three law enforcement officers and severely wounded a fourth just a couple of weeks later.

It seems that a little bit of relevance is for some people intoxicating, and when it recedes in this case it starts the bereavement process all over again. So now it’s the police who caused the flooding.

The 15 minutes of fame this will generate comes with a little less positive note than the last, though. What’s on the video above is painfully stupid, and it’s OK to say so.