“I can’t breathe,” George Floyd.
The prelude to the week started with armed thugs threatening the government with mayhem if they didn’t get their way. I agree with their goal but two things bothered me. And surprised me. We Liberals like to tell ourselves that these are just man-boys trying to compensate for small dicks – or something – but these guys didn’t look like week men trying to act tough, they looked like marginalized men – who really were tough – trying to look as scary as they could. The bigger surprise, looking back from the cop’s reaction to unarmed protesters, was that there was no pushback from the police. I had a shivering moment when I thought, Oh man! there are more of us, but they are better armed and the police are on their side.
Back on Monday, George Floyd was killed by a Peace Officer, Derek Chauvin. Killed slowly, while begging for his life. We all asked ourselves, what kind of man does that, what kind of human being kills a man like that? The answer is “A cop because they pretty much can”. Even with a video of the eight-plus minutes, it took the cop to murder Floyd, it took several days to charge the cop and six days to book him. As the reality of the killing sunk in, the protests grew and turned nasty.
On Tuesday, out of nowhere, some asshole woman calls the police on a black guy who is out birdwatching saying, “I’m calling the cops…I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” He was out Birdwatching for crying out loud. Birdwatching. But it wasn’t a case of birdwatching while black, she called the cops because he had the audacity to ask her to leash her dog in New York’s Central Park.
Then, around the time the President, during his daily talk – press conference is too grandiose a term – told us what a great job he is doing, we passed the one-hundred-thousand-dead landmark. One hundred thousand souls – and that is probably an undercount – dying alone. Stalin is reputed to have said A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic, well so is 100,000. Every once in a while, a name will pop up in the paper – pop up on the screen, really – a well know Amazon Indigenous activist or an altruistic restaurant owner has died of Covid-19, but most of the one hundred thousand souls have disappeared from the American conscience like a rock dropped in a mine shaft.
The world’s economy, our economy is in freefall and our president is preoccupied with strange conspiracies about Joe Scarborough. It is disturbing that the President of the United States goes after individual citizens. It is so cowardly, but it is also distracting. The economy is in freefall and supply lines are trashed so getting out of this mess is not going to be simple.
As the protests turned nasty, the cops got nastier and then, in some places, they rioted just like the cops did in Chicago at the ’68 Democratic Convention. I watched a video of a New York cop driving by a peaceful crowd spaying – randomly – pepper spray as he drove by; I watched two other New York cop cars just drive into a crowd. I watched another video of a cop pushing his bicycle into a black woman, knocking her down, and then I watched a white woman, half the cop’s size push back, knowing her whiteness protected her.
We have militarized the police, they no longer seem to be here to “Serve and Protect” the people, they now seem to be here to control. Somehow, as a nation, we can not afford to protect our doctors – our state governors have to bg for protective equipment from foreign countries – but we have enough riot gear to cover anything. What a graphic statement on who we have become, what a statement of our values.
I want to end with saying I also saw a video of the Chief of Police of Santa Cruz take a knee with the protestors – who broke nothing – and the Chief of Police of Houston first speak movingly and emotionally to the protesters and then march with them. The sun is shining today and the world looks better but…
What a shitty week it has been.