You couldn't have missed the headlines, especially tragic here in the heart of the season celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace.
Two NYPD officers were assassinated as they sat in their patrol car last Saturday.
What you most likely did miss are the emerging details about the gunman, who killed himself in a subway station shortly after shooting the two policemen.
That's because, by and large, those particulars have been sugarcoated like a candy cane.
The headlines are bad enough, of course; it was a cowardly ambush attack on two innocent men sworn to protect and serve.
But it gets worse with the details. The gunman was a lifelong criminal, amassing a lengthy, violent rap sheet in only 10 short years of legal adulthood.
How a felon (with a conviction and jail time for a gun crime, no less) gets a semiautomatic handgun in Baltimore defies all gun-control logic. Maryland passed one of the strictest gun laws in the nation in 2013.
It's not always easy to know what a murderer is thinking. Sometimes killers simply snap and leave no explanation.
Others, like the one in this case, like to use social media to express their hate-filled sentiments.
Alongside a photo of his illegally obtained silver handgun, the gunman posted this message on Instagram two hours before the shooting: "They Take 1 Of Ours ... Let's Take 2 Of Theirs."
That was followed by RIP notations for Eric Garner and Michael Brown (who both died at the hands of police). He then included a pistol icon followed by the ominous words, "I'm Putting Pigs In A Blanket."
Incredibly, more than 200 people "liked" his post.
Clearly, with a black gunman targeting two random non-black policemen (he probably thought they were white, but Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were Hispanic and Asian-American, respectively) simply because they wore NYPD blue, this is an open-and-shut hate crime.
He committed a revenge killing against a whole class of people. If he's not a hate criminal, who is?
The only reason there seems to be resistance to such blanket declarations in this New York case is because candor is the enemy of propaganda.
It's true that the gunman's actions have been roundly condemned, from President Barack Obama to Attorney General Eric Holder, who called the killing "an unspeakable act of barbarism."
That falls short of condemning his beliefs and motivations, however. And comments about possible mental illness, though no official diagnosis has surfaced yet, is a red herring that could apply to all unconscionable crimes.
A candid characterization of the New York gunman is that he was a chronic criminal: a thief, a bully, a racist and, ultimately, a coward.
You don't run up 19 arrests in two states without acting selfishly, irresponsibly and unlawfully. Which is to say he behaved very much like most other career criminals.
Viewed from a thousand miles away as a gunman in a news story, he seems an anonymous statistic. But he would have been known personally in his circle or his neighborhood; probably also by local police who repeatedly arrested him.
He was likely known for what he was: a violent, convicted felon.
You may know such people in your own town. If you do, it's probably from a distance. For the vast majority of Americans who are law-abiding, there's simply not much common ground for any kind of relationship with a career criminal.
But the local police have to deal with such criminals day in, day out.
Here's where the candor comes in. A violent, convicted felon who continues to choose a criminal lifestyle is always going to mistrust police, maybe even hate them, with good reason.
In a criminal's rationalizing mind, the police want to take away their freedom.
In truth, criminals are lawbreakers and the police are law enforcers, tasked with protecting society and putting bad guys behind bars, where they belong.
Here's where the propaganda comes in.
There's no political gain if the conversation about crime ever boils down to personal responsibility. Most Americans share a remarkable unity when it comes to having little patience with individuals who persistently make selfish, irresponsible decisions.
That's why race-baiters prefer to talk in mass systemic terms (black mistrust of cops), and strenuously try to avoid getting bogged down in discussions of individual criminal records.
Today, special-interest groups use the word "spin" as a polite term for yesteryear's propaganda--but the end is the same. Truth is sacrificed on the altar of a narrow agenda.
Practiced propagandists know that "the big lie" is all that has to hit the headlines, because that's all most people will read or see. "Hands up! Don't shoot!" is a totally untrue characterization, but so what?
Its purpose was to rouse support for protests to generate political leverage.
The only problem is, countless people may yet believe something that's not true, and draw wrong conclusions--and frustrations--from that false belief.
Propagandists don't care about that.
But we as a society should, and so should our elected leadership.
Here's hoping we can move toward more candor, and progress, in 2015.
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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 12/26/2014