There Are No Heroes Here

Courtesy of NBC News

After several days of protesting, rioting and now looting, America as an enterprise, as the home of the free and the brave, as a democratic beacon standing against tyranny and injustice, all of it is an illusion.  We are not advancing, if you are keeping score; we are in free fall.  And there are no heroes or leaders here to stop the country from bleeding out.

There are the protestors standing in opposition to the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers, only one of whom has been arrested and charged.  They carry signs pleading for justice, for an end to the endless killing of black men.  Mostly, they crowd the streets chanting and decrying this latest atrocity which should be an affront to every American because when one is treated unjustly, we are all deprived of our human rights.

In the last few days and nights, we have witnessed another group hiding within those protestors:  the rioters and the looters, bent on destroying businesses and property while sowing the seeds of anarchy.  These people are out for themselves, not for George Floyd or the greater good of abolishing injustice.

Finally, there are the police officers who indiscriminately target everyone on the street without regard for those who are protesting peacefully or the journalists telling the stories.  Cops shooting non-lethal rounds at the photographers and reporters, all of them with press credentials in plain sight.  What else could this be but yet another attack on the media as the “enemy of the people?”  This can be traced directly to Trump and his undemocratic attack on a free press.

The violence doesn’t stop with the reporters.  We have footage of New York City police officers driving into crowds and injuring people.  We see police officers knocking an elderly man with a cane down into the street in Utah.  His crime?  Waiting for the bus that will never come because service has been suspended due to protests.  When police officers realized the journalists across the street were filming, they quickly helped the poor man up.  New York officers again drove down a street in one of the outer boroughs, swinging out an open car door to strike people randomly.  Another officer threw a woman into the gutter so hard that she went into a seizure.

The police have become a military force patrolling a war zone.  They have the flash-bang grenades; they have the AR-15s; they have the armored vehicles; they have the military body armor; they have the tear gas canisters.  Once again, the protestors have face masks and their cell phone cameras.  Only the rioters and the looters have rocks and baseball bats.  Yet everyone on the street is targeted.

That, after all, is the distinction we must make:  the thugs (police and rioters/looters) and the protestors (tired of the senseless murder of black men).  We have four groups at war with each other on the streets of our cities, and only one group has no protection other than a cardboard sign they constructed on their own.  And cardboard does not stand up well to rubber bullets and pepper spray.

We are watching in the blue glow of our televisions the nadir of our democracy.  This is the way a country ends, with a bang and a whimper, with a knee on the neck of every citizen, for if one is deprived of human rights, we are all in jeopardy.  When those reporting the stories from the streets are shot with rubber bullets, those of us who are informed by their work are next on the list.

So what do we do?  What will happen tonight, tomorrow, and the rest of the week?  Will this blow over?

We are way past the point of a blow over.  No, this is what it is like to live in the midst of sociological upheaval.  Things will be rough for a while.  We know that in previous social unrest, it took months for change to come, for the society to rebuild, for the economic damage to be rectified, for the general population to forget, or at least make peace with what has been inflicted upon them.  No, we will have to endure this for many, many days, months and possibly years.  We need to re-examine our behavior.  We need to go to the ballot box and elect true leaders.  We must keep pushing, pushing and pushing for social justice, for human rights, because if we abandon our humanity, we will be truly lost and destroyed.

This murderous oppression of black men, this militarized policing of our streets, this general disregard for human life and dignity must come to an end.  However, we are up against the rise of hate crimes, of white nationalism, of a pervasiveness of violence perpetrated upon each other.  It is, quite literally, all about people’s inhumanity.

There is a cancer of fear and loathing on the streets of America, and we will need to go through a lot of pain to cut it out.  At stake is our democracy and our future.