It is fitting that I should return to this blog and find the following in my drafts — another long delayed post — the day after one of the police officers in the George Floyd case — the one who was convicted of second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter. He could be sentenced for up to 40 years, I heard.
So much has happened in the last year. There’s no sense repeating it all here. But I did want to publish this before I move on to more regular writing.
It has been more than six months since I last tried to write a blog post. The last one, “The Season of Enduring”, I found in my drafts just now and had to publish it with a sense of irony. I really had no idea what would be asked of me, and of all of us.
While I was feeling sad and mopey in December, a new respiratory virus was sickening people on the other side of the world. By March, it had come to America where it spread quickly, arriving on each coast and spreading more or less unchecked (we could have a political argument about this point) for weeks before State and local authorities began to shut things down.
My University transitioned to online only classes the week before St. Patrick’s Day, and a few days later, sent all employees home who could work from home. Restaurants and bars closed. Movie theaters, K-12 schools, even. All “non-essential” businesses had to close if they couldn’t operate remotely. Those first couple of weeks were hands down the weirdest time of my life.
While the US was just getting started, and wondering if we were all being alarmist, the country of Italy shut down and we heard stories about people dying in their homes and their families having to sit with their bodies because there was no one to get them and no place to put them. Hospitals were well past capacity, there were not enough supplies for patients or for medical personnel. And Italy was hardly the only country that suffered this way.
I think in America a lot of us had the sense that we would stay home for a couple of weeks then things would pretty much return to normal. It was so novel. We’re accustomed to our threats being handled elsewhere. This time the call was coming from inside the house.
There was a run on toilet paper and cleaning supplies, pod cast equipment and flour. Baking bread suddenly became a national hobby. Gas prices plummeted. Domestic violence skyrocketed and parents everywhere wondered “what the hell am I supposed to do with my kids??”
We made it about 2 weeks, in my estimation, before the catastrophic lack of leadership undermined any positive changes that may have taken root. The unity that we had been patching together to face this new and unknown threat was fractured down party lines once again. People grew restless. Stories of business owners committing suicide because they were going to have to shut down, stories of livestock being slaughtered and burned, gallons of milk poured out even as people experienced shortages at the grocery store because our supply chains had broken down.
While we all waited for the federal task force to do something useful, our governors made the best decisions they could, based on varying combinations of science and politics. And a new term called “astroturfing” rose to our consciousness as certain interested parties planted the seeds of rebellion using social media to simulate a grassroots effort against our State governments. These were fertilized by the President and have now blossomed into what appears to me to be a full out crisis.
Then in May, four police officers in Minneapolis murdered a man in the street in front of cell phone toting witnesses, in lieu of actually investigating the alleged passing of a counterfeit bill at a convenience store.
As America watched George Floyd tell the officers that he couldn’t breathe, as he called out for his mother, as he was cruelly and needlessly murdered in front of all of us, we had to suddenly face a new reckoning. Many of us remembered Michael Brown and Treyvon Martin and Philando Castile and Eric Gardner and Tamir Rice and John Crawford III and so many others. Then we learned of more. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery.
People in every major city and so many small towns and cities to protest the systemic raciscm so evident in American law enforcement. This predictably led to some rioting and provided a national stage for even more police brutality as protesters and members of the media were run down by horses and cars, tear gassed from moving vehicles shot at with “less lethal” munitions that caused at least three people to lose eyes and several others to suffer traumatic brain injuries.