A clown in a cowboy hat says something ridiculous. A lazy media trudges en masse toward an easy and tired place. A blowhard cartoon does his predictable, inflammatory dance with lighter fluid. An angry mob gathers, shaking pitchforks and torches. Coward companies fold. Nobody shows any courage. So much shouting. So much following. This is how lynchings started once. Feel like progress to you?

You have to wonder how gentleman leader Martin Luther King would have felt watching Al Sharpton contaminate his cause.

The media mushroom cloud over mummified Don Imus didn’t improve race relations or start an important conversation in America. All it did, as is so often the case in matters of race, is make a lot of people more hostile. You aren’t entering a reasonable discussion when everyone starts it with their fists up.

Suffice it to say, a race-baiting instigator like Sharpton isn’t persuading or illuminating. He’s dividing, not uniting, and profiting from it. Sharpton polarizes in a way that pushes scared white people away and embarrasses more than a few black people. And what gets lost in that divide is the ability to discuss these things in a way that improves instead of inflames. It is only the difference between treating a wound with a healing solvent and treating it with acid.

And we’re all somehow concentrating on one tiny little Imus pebble making its way down the mountain while ignoring what sent it in motion – the hiccup of gurgling lava that represents warning from an angry volcano. We’re not nearly OK with race relations in this country when Sharpton can be allowed to recklessly spray lighter fluid without perspective again the very same week that all the charges in the Duke lacrosse rape case are dismissed because of the last time he and Jesse Jackson scorched the earth this way.

Al and Jesse, please be more careful with that bullying double standard you’ve been handed and wield among the fearful like a blade. You can use the sharp knife you’ve been given to heal, like a surgeon, or you can use it to wound, like a mugger. Without proof, you got a Duke coach fired, three kids stained and a No. 1 team’s season canceled because you are bullies who aren’t always too discerning about how and whom you punch whenever the cameras have gathered.

Two of the most reasonable voices you heard this week? Two jocks. Jim Brown and Charles Barkley. They thought national shame and a suspension were enough for Imus, who isn’t worth this kind of time. And they saved some of their greatest disgust for the race-baiting Sharpton.

“I hate it,” Brown said when asked how he felt about Sharpton being a voice for black America. “I really hate it. It is a cheap shot. It is too easy. Look for the headlines. Go where the cameras are. Jump on these basically helpless individuals and don’t put in the real work. We’ve got language by these rappers. We have a gangsta culture. We’ve got athletes on the page of USA Today not doing the right thing. We have a community of kids killing each other. Our schools are going down the drain. Why not try to elevate real situations? We can’t make a living off Imus and chasing ambulances.”

Says Barkley, “People went crazy. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are like gods. It drives me nuts.”

But these are the leaders who step into the void in the absence of real leadership, so Barkley laments, “That’s why black people are struggling. All our black leaders are jocks or entertainers. We’re not really leaders.”