The New Black Panthers came riding into Ferguson, Missouri, with bugles blaring. Finally, someone is going to take action to right the wrongs in Ferguson.

“Y'all declared war when y'all had killed Mike Brown. This is a revolution, the revolution is the only solution. You kill us, we kill you,” chanted a group of Panthers. A little extreme?

Perhaps, but just look at the racial composition of the Ferguson Police Force. There are 50 white officers and only three black officers and this in a city where two-thirds of the population is black and one-third is white. Terrible!

A good starting point to eradicate this racial bigotry would be to rectify the racially lopsided police force in Ferguson. Instead of 50 whites and three blacks, the political correct (PC) racial profile should be 18 whites and 35 blacks. Solution: rightsize the police department by firing 32 white officers and hiring 32 black officers.

A vigorous recruitment program must be initiated to hire 32 more black police officers. And let's forget about those colorblind mental qualification tests. Since they do not guarantee the correct color mix they should be eliminated and make race the primary requirement. Farfetched?

The New York City Fire Department doesn't think so. It had a similar problem. The physical requirements caused a low number of women fire fighters. Solution: the physical requirements were scraped. Problem solved.

And what about the Michael Brown grand jury: nine whites and only three blacks. That's in your face discrimination. Solution: disband the overly-white jury for one that is overly black like Ferguson's population. The PC grand jury would be four whites and eight blacks. It's too late for this in the Brown case but doable in future grand jury selections.

But what about the other victimized minorities, don't they count, too? Isn't it discriminatory to overlook them?

The idealized national, not regional, Ferguson Police Department should be---according to the federal government's list of minorities---50 percent women, 19 percent handicapped, 17 percent Latino, 13 percent black, 5 percent Asian, 3 percent LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), and also the latest trodden-upon faction for which there are as yet no statistics, the asexuals.

Being nondiscriminatory can be enormously complicated. So for simplicities sake, we shall concentrate on the 13 percent of black Americans. Here are just a few of the inequities facing black Americans and how they can be overcome.

Approximately 1,570,000 Americans are incarcerated. Of these 1,308,333 million are blacks and 261,660 are whites. That's a ratio 6:1. Intolerable! Solution: release 1,046,673 black prisoners. That would give a PC ratio of 1:1, perfect. Granted, this will probably cause some societal disruption, but you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Outside prison walls we find the same rampant racism this time with income. The average per capita income for whites is $30,000, but for blacks it is only $18,000. Can't have that in America. Solution: give every black adult $1,000 a month every month, then this, too, could be added to the number of wrongs made right.

Lastly, we come to a really, really big problem. The cruelest form of racism known: lifespan. The average white American lives 78.7 years; but his black counterpart lives only 74.3 years. While the increase in longevity has progressed steadily for both races, the racial divide has remained a persistent four-year gap.

No one knows how to increase the lifespan of blacks. Nevertheless, equality can be achieved by decreasing the lifespan of whites. Solution: Perhaps among that neo-barbarian horde of protesters there are some who are so truly eager to slay the dragon of racism that they will sacrifice four years of their life to narrow the lifespan gap. Let's hope so.

In the end, the problem of equality squeezes us between two stones. To be nondiscriminatory to some groups we are forced to be discriminatory to others. In many cases, the solutions are worse than the imagined grievances. And some problems defy remediation. We can't win for losing. Maybe just scraping the whole idea of enforced equality is the best answer---maybe it's the only answer.

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA