O.J. Simpson Wouldn’t  Impress My Mother

O.J. Simpson, The Juice, paroled back in 2017, after serving nine years behind bars for burglary, is now, pretty much with his current tweets, thumbing his nose at the justice system that found him not guilty for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

“I got a little getting even to do” Simpson bragged and threatened recently in the debut of his Twitter account launched 2 days after the 25th anniversary of the June 12, 1994 murder.

Who believed, back then, that O.J. was actually innocent?

My mother wasn’t one of who thought he shoulda walked and she certainly didn’t believe he shoulda been paroled.

My mother was a kind lady. She impressed everyone around her with good deeds.

Her children knew her to be kind but stern. She took a straight and narrow path when it came to raising us.

Apologies weren’t exactly the order of her day. She never appeared interested in lame excuses her offspring tried offering up in regard to our wrongdoings.

My mother’s philosophy of raising children seemed to me to have been that kids are always on the march for finding their parent wrong.

My mother wouldn’t have been impresed with  O.J. having been the model prisoner, which the parole board said he was,  and  his, as  mom would have called it, contrived apology for his armed robbery and kidnapping criminal activity .

Simpson also falls into another of my mother’s philosophical categories which we had to hear when we whined about a punishment we thought we didn’t deserve.

You Got Away With One

My mother wasn’t touched by her children’s claim of innocence for their misdeed. Instead she responded with her forever hard line.

“Just think of this punishment as the one you should have gotten for the misdeed you got away with.”

My mother didn’t fool around. Of course, we also whined that she wasn’t fair. Her continuous golden words for this one quite aptly primed her offspring for the world we would enter.

“Life’s not fair,” she would say, always with an air of authority and without a hint of being intimidated by the whining of her children.

O.J. Simpson, The Juice, was found worthy of release at his parole hearing in Carson City, Nev., in spite of what the news commentators and other television talking heads kept calling “the elephant in the room.”

That elephant being, of course, the Los Angeles County Superior Court criminal trial where Simpson had been charged and acquitted for two counts of murder for the June 12, 1994 deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

“Yeah, he did it,” back then, a young adult Black male said to me with a jubilant grin on his face that he had great difficulty trying to conceal.

“White folks get away with murder, embezzlement and everything else, so why shouldn’t a Black man get to walk?” the Black guy asked me.

A rhetorical question, I figured, and therefore didn’t try prolonging our difference-of- opinion- conversation regarding O.J.’s walking.

The young Black man had a point —a point, I might add, that many Black folk agreed with.

Who Said Life Was Fair?

But my very wise mom’s wit speaks to me on this.

Although her “Life’s Not Fair” philosophy doesn’t make headlines other than in my head, it speaks loudly, for me, in the case of O.J.

That path of which my mother chose to raise her children by — you got away with that but I’m gettin’ you on this — was certainly thought, by many people, to be the underlying reasoning behind O.J.’s prison sentence for entering a hotel room with several companions and taking hundreds of pieces of sports memorabilia from two men.

O.J., who was convicted back in 2008 on 12 counts, including burglary with the use of a deadly weapon, kidnapping and assault, was sentenced to a minimum of nine years and a maximum of 33.

Having served the minimum, O.J. was granted parole and is said to have been a model prisoner. He’s apologized for his criminal behavior that put him behind bars.

In a lengthy presentation to his parole board he claimed he didn’t realize he was committing a crime when he took the memorabilia that he said was rightfully his.

“It was mine,” he whined.

SOUND THE SILENT ELEPHANT’S TRUMPET

My mother has moved on to higher ground, having passed away. However, she left a legacy.

That silent elephant in the Nevada hearing room may not have raised a trunk with the loud trumpeting sound the species is known to make when excited, lost, angry, playful or surprised, but following my mother’s philosophy, I’m sounding my own trumpet saying O.J. got off in the Los Angeles courtroom for what public opinion felt he was guilty of, and the sentence he received, some years later, for taking back his stuff in Las Vegas should have kept him locked up for his full sentence.