Waukesha Tragedy Calls for Serious Bail Reform, Not Finger-Pointing
No, there is absolutely nothing funny about the horrors that abruptly ended Waukesha, Wisconsin’s Christmas parade. But Mary Lemanski gave it a try, for which she has received more brickbats than belly laughs.
Lemanski was social media manager for the DuPage County (Illinois) Democrats until she reacted in tweets to the horror in Wisconsin in which an SUV plowed into the city’s usually joy-filled parade, leaving five dead and 40 injured.
“It was probably just self-defense #Wisconsin #KyleRittenhouse,” Lemanski tweeted about the tragedy.
She was referring, of course, to the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha a few days earlier. He successfully pleaded self-defense and was acquitted last week in the killing of two men and seriously wounding a third during protests in Kenosha last year.
In her tweets that have been deleted, she also said, in reply to one of many negative reactions, “I’m sad. I’m sad anytime anyone dies. I just believe in Karma and this came around quick on the citizens of Wisconsin.”
So did unemployment for Lemanski. Citing “karma,” the Buddhist principle of cause and effect, did not diminish the foul impression that she was blaming Wisconsinites for the nightmare that had come to their state.
She announced her resignation in another tweet, although her boss, Ken Mejia-Beal, chair of the county’s Democrats, said she was “let go.”
“We don’t applaud or celebrate tragedy,” Mejia-Beal said in a statement regarding what he called “callous and reprehensible posts.”
“We are with the victims of this tragedy,” he quite properly said.
The lesson here is to think before you tweet. Twitter, among other social networks, is not a wise place for you to vent your pain and frustrations to the world before you’ve given yourself at least a little time to process such a catastrophic event.
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