This is a risky thing for me to write, but I feel like I have an outside perspective on the divides cracking the US apart, so I may as well share it. Sometimes it is hard to think when you are right in the middle of a lightning storm, watching neighbors get gassed and shot point blank with rubber bullets that can break bones and shatter skulls. I only recently learned that those rubber bullets are supposed to be shot at the ground so that when they hit a protester, they won’t kill them.
I know I’m supposed to focus my rage on Trump and on his tweets threatening violence against protestors.
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” Trump tweeted shortly before 1 a.m. Friday, adding, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
“Twitter is doing nothing about all of the lies & propaganda being put out by China or the Radical Left Democrat Party,” Trump said in a later tweet. “They have targeted Republicans, Conservatives & the President of the United States. Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!”
Trump’s record aside, when I read these Tweets, I didn’t understand why Twitter banned them. I mean, people who set businesses on fire are thugs and, under ordinary circumstances, thieves do get shot at. There are reports that far-right militias are responsible for a lot of the vandalism and escalation.
I don’t see the problem with the Tweets until I zoom out and see the context in which black protesters ride horses in Houston because they know that the racist cops will be more reluctant to hurt a horse than them.
Nevertheless, I was still confused by all of the criticism of Trump for getting protestors out of the way so that he could walk over to a church to stand in front of it with a bible. It was a symbolic, strongman gesture that would connect to the sort of audience he tries to cultivate. It clearly didn’t connect to the people who are fanning the flames of horror on Twitter, but maybe they have forgotten the healing power of religion and of gathering with your community to sing and think about how we want things to be. Then again, when most tweets are generated or upvoted by foreign bot farms with a political agenda, most of us know that social media is a poor reflection of the real story about the US today and that the real plague affecting the US is real life disconnection caused by the replacement of real communities with fake, online communities driven by divisive identity politics.
Churches are an excellent way to heal this disconnection in times like these. It is not good that for the president to walk over to a boarded up church that had been set on fire the previous night, he had to throw tear gas at protestors. The optics of these scenes send confusing, mixed messages, but when people focus on their hatred of Trump, they forget the positive thing he was trying to draw attention to.
I think that the real story today is not about what we do see happening, but what we don’t see. What you don’t see on the streets right now are far-right militias with AK47s. If the police all went home, guess who would go out? I think that is what we would’ve been seeing right now if Clinton had been elected and I must say that I prefer the protests we are seeing right now to having to watch a federal army remove far-right militias from city or state capitols. The people protesting right now, are breaking windows but they are not hanging people or shooting people like far-right militias tend to do. Despite the police’s serious flaws, they are far better than a far-right militia. There may be a substantial number of far-right people within the police who shouldn’t be there, but the events of this past week will help out them so that they can be removed.
These protests will serve as a lesson to the police that they will not soon forget. They will also serve as a lesson that when people don’t study history books, they require real-world reminders of the rules of civil society:
- don’t elect demagogues who appeal to racists in order to get elected
- don’t take immigrant children away from their mothers and keep them in animal pens
- police shouldn’t murder people or harrass and violently arrest black men.
It is so much more efficient to have those who enforce the law read some books than to have to take care of their traumatized victims and to clean up looted stores once every few years. It would be so nice to have a smart, well educated police force that people could respect. The country has a ton of college graduates who would love to pay off their student loans — why not raise the bar and put some of those people to work as police officers or as civil liberties instructors for the officers?
I recall a strange news story from about a decade ago about a man who was rejected by the police because his IQ was too high and they’d found that smart people tended to get bored and quit. Maybe they quit because the people they have to work with are depressingly dumb. That doesn’t have to be the case. If we want dumb guys with guns running things, we’d choose the people who join far-right militias like this one:
That video was taken last summer and those guys were just itching to cause trouble and act like Nazis. They have guns and self-righteous rage, but they are pumped up on steroids and are not healthy. After the coronavirus gets to everybody, we aren’t going to have to worry about guys like them any more. Politics will change because the demographic balance will have shifted and, at that point, Trump will be long gone. He will have served his purpose of showing everyone the fear and aggression hiding under the surface of certain Americans who think of themselves as good and patriotic.
Despite his far-right optics and dog whistles, Trump didn’t invent Machiavellian politics and I think it is a mistake to try to pack all of the flaws of the system itself into him and turn him into an effigy. I also think it is a mistake to place the blame for the flaws in the system on the top 1% of the economy.
They just played the game they were given. Should they have realized that the game was unfair and stepped out? Definitely, but it takes people a long time to develop that perspective when they are focused on playing the games they’ve been trained to play. They are practically sleep walking.
Riots do tend to wake up the sleepwalkers, but it doesn’t always stick. We need to keep waking those people up on a daily basis and get them to help dismantle the bad parts of the system that is oppressing everyone. To do that, we have to zoom out and look at the system as a whole rather than default to focusing on finding scapegoats.
The grown ups all know this. They don’t want their kids raising hell and destroying their neighborhoods, but they can’t control everybody’s rage and fear. They can’t be mom and dad to every motherless and fatherless person out there.. or can they? I think churches could help here.
We all knew this Trump thing was going to turn out badly, we just weren’t sure how badly. Now we know. Times like these bring out everyone’s true colors.
- Immigration officials showed their true colors when they separated children from their parents and made them sleep on concrete floors like animals.
- The police showed their true colors again and again, acting like brain dead, armoured vigilantes with no knowledge of or care for civil liberties under the law.
- The far-right militias came out and set fire to six miles of a Minneapolis street populated by immigrant owned businesses and corporate owned chain stores.
- The kids showed their undeveloped colors by setting fire to places where they did not feel welcome. A neglected child will set fire to his home just to feel its warmth.
- The brave people came out and showed their true colors by expressing community spirit, heroism, and unity in the face of division.
To complicate matters, there is doubt that many of those who set the worst fires were even Americans.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who tweeted on Saturday that the city is “now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/videos-threats-few-signs-protests-have-been-stoked-outsider-extremist-n1220451
Sure, the looters were Americans; people are opportunists everywhere, but arsonists and barricade builders are a rarer breed. I think that people should remember that foreign groups have learned how to pose as local antifa while fomenting divisions and seeding chaos. They did that in Hamburg, Germany during the G8 protests and torched a grocery store. Locals would never do that. The locals are not that stupid and destructive.
Not everyone’s true colors are beautiful all of the time. People can change and become better than they were during their weakest moments, but they need help and protection from stronger people to give them space to heal or protect their weak spots.
When you are a kid, you want to see everything, figure out how the world works, and make a positive difference, but after seeing all of the videos of stupid, brutal, racist cops, I just can’t look anymore.
Have you also gotten to the point where there is nothing that you want to see?
I want to write something helpful about what I’ve seen on Twitter concerning police brutality, but it still feels too raw. There are no words for it all.
I had a panic attack after watching a handcuffed man attacked by a police dog while five officers walked around like idiots pointing loaded pistols at anyone in the vicinity while they took several minutes to pry the dog’s teeth off of the crying man’s leg. He was bitten several times before the dog latched onto his calf like a vice. There was a lot of screaming from the people around who wanted to help him. This was on my Twitter feed, right after a video showing a nurse crying. She was in a medical tent where she’d been trying to help a man who was bleeding profusely from a rubber bullet wound, but the cops were ‘clearing the area’ and they shot at the medics in the tent. She ran away from the tent and was crying because she’d left the injured man behind and he was bleeding profusely. This made my head hurt intensely.
Whenever a police force switches from protecting and serving to eliminating enemies, they need to just stop and go home until they get their heads back together, but if there actually are foreign enemies which have infiltrated domestic protest groups like antifa, we need to work with the system rather than against it. We also have to remember that if the police just go home, worse people will come out — like those far-right militia guys with automatic rifles.
Antifa was declared a terrorist group by the federal government and I understand that for an administration that is already enacting fascist policies, the optics of this are very bad. I still think that we should remember that everybody thinks of themselves as anti-fascist without knowing that they are acting like fascists. We should also remember that sometimes wolves masquerade in sheep’s clothing. There is evidence that on twitter, antifa propaganda is being spread by outside, far-right groups.
We need to have police. We can’t just get rid of all of them and I hope that they will soon be forced to fire their stupidest, most cracked, disgraceful employees, but we all should remember that everyone cracks under pressure. The people suffering under quarantines and racism have cracked as well, but we can repair these cracks and make our country beautiful again — greatness be damned.
I know that we all have it in our hearts to forgive one another. We all understand fear and suffering.
If anything good comes out of this tragedy, it is that Trump’s supporters will be forced to bear witness to the evils their philosophy has brought in the form of homelessness, motherless immigrant children, and innocents murdered by racist cops.
People can learn from their mistakes.
One mistake people make is to forget that things can always get worse. In the lead up to November, there may be a historic hurricane season and a Hong Kong or Iran related naval confrontation which will disrupt the electoral process. Coronavirus might strike each and every one of our homes. This sort of chaos might prevent political change from happening right now, but we all know that change is coming. We know that even when we don’t like who sits in the office of the president, the office itself is important to protect.
Maybe someone will come up with a really good plan to peacefully replace the entire government with a body of representatives who are chosen by lottery on a yearly basis — like federal jury duty, but we haven’t gotten to that point yet and we don’t want to see how bad things have to get before an emergency military dictatorship forms.
I comfort myself with the idea that order disappears on one length scale only to re-emerge on another. In times of change, large-scale order breaks up, but this allows small-scale order and local community connections to re-emerge. Some of that will be good and some bad as creation leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. Throughout such transformations, people need to stay brave and stick together.
I don’t think that assassinating the people in charge will help matters. It might actually make things worse by reducing corporate accountability. One problem is that rich people put their money in the stock market and they are not accountable for how it is used. Nor do they have much knowledge about how their money is invested. We all know that we shouldn’t make it so easy for people to passively skim money from the system like this. It should take some work and even though it takes the work of the people the rich hire to manage their money, with automation of this work, this system becomes even more unsustainable and I think that experts like Elisabeth Warren have some good ideas about how to fix this system. We might have to wait awhile before that happens, but I think an opportunity will present itself when the time is right.
The stock market seems like a great system for making sure that the most efficient companies get the most money, but efficiency isn’t always optimal for long-term stability. For example, networks of small businesses might be less efficient but more robust in the face of things that threaten to bring down entities that are too big to fail. Since the coronavirus will kill small businesses while inflating monopolies, we are going to need leaders who know how to responsibly roll that change back.
By tying up everyone’s retirement portfolios in an automated system, the people who control the automation hold everyone hostage and get a massive amplification of their influence — influence they may not even want to have. They’d rather have power without responsibility and this is a huge responsibility.
Too much reliance on the stock market is a stepping stone towards the tragedy of the commons, corporate communism, and control via automation. Who gets that control? It isn’t people. It is the system itself and the system has no code of ethics or morality, it just is.
We need police officers who understand ethics, morality, social injustice, and law on a deep level. We don’t want mindless, racist, system drones. Today, we want the most disgraceful police departments to get major funding cuts so that they have to fire all of the idiots. Perhaps a re-education fund could be provided for the remaining and newer officers who need to pay off their student loans. The military grade gear that police have bought but don’t know how to use needs to be reconsidered and the incestuous relationship between the legal system and the police needs to be fixed, along with the entire prison system. Why not turn them into colleges? A lot of adjunct professors have been produced in recent years who have been earning minimum wage at universities that have seen better days.
I’m not worried that we will see wholesale carnage like at Kent State because most college kids today are staying home with their phones, getting stupider by the second. All of those black kids who’ve been outside playing basketball and behaving like actual, social human beings rather than idiot computer heads – those kids are the future because they can still think and get things done. We’re going to need their leadership. The racist, old people who elected Trump won’t live forever. They will leave behind their confused, internet-addicted kids glued to their gaming consoles. With support from their local churches, kids who have avoided this trap are going to be out in the world making things work through cooperation and innovation. They and their parents remember that this violence is a road to nowhere.
I think there is a good reason that we saw violence first erupt in one of the whitest cities in the US – Minneapolis. Not only did the white folks there not learn the lessons that the black folks learned through decades of civil disobedience and patience, but the cold winters of Minneapolis encouraged the sort of local disconnection made worse by fake-internet connections and echo chambers that tell everyone that everything is okay when it isn’t.
The places where close-knit, real-world communities are still functional will thrive in this environment, while cities that have broken down those communities by pushing fake integration measures that just put a window dressing on a centuries-old wound are the places with the most violence right now. It is highly disillusioning to be sent through a school system that tells you that everything is possible for you, only to confront the real world where everybody is prejudiced yet unaware of how prejudiced they are.
The pressure of the coronavirus cracked the weakest communities wide open and those are our most liberal, enlightened, whitest cities.
I don’t know who said it first, but there is a crack in everything and it is nothing to be ashamed of. That’s how the light gets in.
The image in the header is from an online, multiplayer videogame called Fortnite that recently self-destructed.
Kirsten Hacker 