It’s not like I didn’t warn you.

Most of us remember our first kiss.  Not because it’s better, or even materially different, than our second or twenty-second kiss,  but because it’s our first.  Nobody remembers their twenty-second, however.  It fades into an amorphous mass.  

But we’re not talking about kisses, right? This is entirely different. Except it’s not.

Too many brutal videos of police needlessly beating people and lying about it turn an outrage into the new normal.  The impact of seeing in living color, maybe even hi-def, police officers beat a human being whose “crime” is not jumping as high or as quickly as some pimple-faced cop demands can have a huge impact on those who have muddled through life believing that such things could never happen.  Like judges.

The hope is that by posting about such things, providing the opportunity for people to see the very things that they have spent a career denying to themselves ever happen, will be a first kiss opportunity for those in the system who need to know what we know.  The fear is that the impact will fade when it’s the twenty-second isolated incident, and they can go back to hiding from the ugliness to go about their business as they always have.

A month ago, that renowned legal scholar, Shaun King, decried our failure to care.

I now ask you what I have asked countless college students:

Can you name a victim of American police in 2016?

Believe it or not, I have yet to speak with a single person — on 10 college campuses — who has correctly identified any of the nearly 300 victims of fatal law enforcement shootings across the country since Jan. 1.

And as King, the master of one-sentence paragraphs, realizes, banging one’s head against a wall doesn’t get better with frequency.

Yet here we are, on April 5, and at least 271 people have been killed at the hands of American enforcement, and only a tiny percentage of the most informed Americans can name a single one of them.

The problem isn’t whether Americans are sufficiently “informed,” Shaun. We’re deluged with information. The problem, dear Shaun, is that we’re over informed, to the point that it’s no longer news, but just another day.  At Fault Lines Links, Ana Sofia Walsh has been chronicling the killings, and the cash settlements, daily.  It’s all there if anyone wants to know. But know what? That it’s Tuesday? Another black guy was killed by a cop? What’s for lunch?

Even the news caboose, the Huffington Post, has come to realize that “the nation has stopped paying attention.”

There have been at least 20 cases in which cops have shot unarmed civilians to death this year, and a HuffPost examination of cable news transcripts found that the major cable news networks have not covered any of them.

Of course, at HuffPo, they attribute the failure to give a shit to their own misguided concerns.

There was no mention of Joseph on CNN, Fox News or MSNBC on the day he died, or on any day since, according to a Huffington Post review of programming. Instead, cable news gleefully reported that Donald Trump had called his Republican opponent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz a “pussy.” The schoolyard insult prompted numerous segments, including “experts” speculating on whether the billionaire’s vulgarity would sink his candidacy. (It didn’t.)

Not everyone has turned their attention from police killing to vulgar politicians uttering vulgarities. Nor does one preclude the other. Cable news has tons of time to fill, and there’s room on air for the daily murder. Still, it’s not there.

The problem isn’t only that we become inured to too much horror, though that takes the sting out of another killing.  The problem is that there is media attention on the Black Lives Matter movement, but not the one that addresses dead black guys lying in the street.

If you squander your political clout on the trivial, your dreaded microaggressions that make you feel sad about having to suffer higher education at Princeton in a school named after Woodrow Wilson, don’t be surprised when the next young, unarmed black man lies dead in the street from a police officer’s bullet.

But then, what’s a dead young black man compared to the brutal pain of Yale not being your safe space?

A movement that began with the focus on one of the most serious, most outrageous problems happening to America, to young black men, morphed into a joke, into puny concerns of fragile teacups. And the inevitable followed:

After all, isn’t this what social justice is all about, pandering to every identitarian interest?  Or else?  This is why we can’t have nice things.  This is why you can’t have nice things.

So the teary voice of Shaun King bemoans:

Some may ask why the coverage itself matters so much, but for many families, the coverage of the police brutality their loved one suffered not only aids the quest for justice, it is sometimes the only justice they receive.

How could this happen? How could police continue to kill, and no one notices? Because of you, Shaun. Because of people like you who find outrage everywhere, in everything. Because of the inability to differentiate between the real and the laughable.  You bombard people with a constant stream of outrage until they grow bored, tired, inured to the harm. It’s nothing special if it happens every day. It’s the new normal, and nobody pays attention to the normal.

And then you demand that we cry just as many tears for the hurt feelings of the special snowflakes as we do for the dead bodies of unarmed innocent people killed by police?  Way to reduce your cred to zero.

For the handful of people for whom this is their sacred cow, their mission in life, notice is paid. But not every person in the nation spends every day obsessed with your cause. Or mine. People have their own self-interest to attend to, and even if they’re willing to give you the occasional glance, they eventually get back to the things that touch their lives.

Why is it you don’t realize this?  It’s not like I didn’t tell you.