The Greater Force

We heard you.

Not at first, not right after the video came out, when there was no denying or spinning a murder, but soon after. It was shocking footage, so it took a few minutes for you to come around to the familiar narrative that George Floyd's death was his fault, somehow.

And then there were those protests. Many, and massive. And some looting and smashing at the edges. And you found your voices again. That is not the way to protest, you said. We write the rules on rage, you said, and this is out of line. We didn't like the way you did it before, on one knee, either. That's a shame about the man we watched get murdered, but he probably had drugs in his system. He probably committed a crime. He probably mouthed off. He probably had a preexisting condition in the form of a working carotid artery.

Somewhere in the back of your head you are able to hold two contrary thoughts at once: "I don't see color. Why does everything have to be about race?" And: "Those people have to expect that stuff like this is going to happen because so many of them are criminals." They don't act right. They've got it coming. It's a shame, but this sort of thing is going to happen, because they're either criminals, or look just like one.

That's what you saw. Criminals, arsonists, freeway-blockers, troublemakers. A criminal force that must be met with greater force.

And I agree. Force? Meet the greater force of sustained, growing, fervent, peaceful protestors marching night after night. After night. After night. They're still marching. United against terrorism.

That's what I'm calling it. Is that word too strong?

What do you do when you see a headline about a victim of violence? You scan down a few lines to see if you're safe. That's a black name. That's a bad neighborhood. That won't happen to me. But when the planes took down the twin towers, you were terrified. As unlikely as it was any one of us would be the victim of terrorist act, you were still afraid because for the first time--for most of us--you knew you were the target. And that's what made it terrorism. It was a message sent to a few and meant for many.

That's what the knee to the neck is. It is a body dangling. It's a message to an entire race: you don't matter. You are disposable, not quite human. White people know very well that this is never going to happen to them. And some of them put that down to their own virtue.

We've heard you. You like to call us snowflakes. But you are the ones who are so afraid of people that you roar for a police state, an autocracy, you cheer the leader who will build you a wall and call up the military against your fellow citizens. You arm yourself against villains that live in your own imagination. Or villains created and served up to you by politicians determined to hold their power through your fear.

But watch this greater force.

It was our dear young neighbors who first mentioned--from a chaste and respectful twelve feet away--that they were on their way to the latest march. I crumpled. How could we miss this? "Dave and I want to be there, but we're just not ready to be in a crowd like that, not now..." That's okay, they said. You shouldn't be there. It's not safe. We're taking one for the team. Don't worry. It's our turn now. They smiled. I wanted to cry.

And I did, a few nights later, when the most audacious march yet ended up a half block away. Thousands poured onto a freeway three lanes wide and marched a mile to the next exit, another two miles to our street, and farther, and there was no fatigue, no letup, just a beautiful stream of young people saying We're done with this shit now. We've had enough. This was the twelfth day of peaceful protest. I stood at the corner, a few yards away, tears seeping into my face mask.

Meanwhile, you think black people get too worked up about race, but you go all to pieces if you're accused of having white privilege. And you're right, in a way. That so-called privilege should be the default condition of all people. Everyone should have the sense of their own agency, should be able to prosper in a world that accepts them, or crash and burn in spite of a world that accepts them. And then it would not be described as a privilege at all.

But that is not the world we live in. And until black lives matter, which it is clear they do not, it can never be said that all lives matter. Unbunch your privilege panties and own that.

Minnesota Burning

I've seen this before. I remember when Martin Luther King was murdered. I remember my father telling us the cleaning woman in his office took him aside and said Mr. Brewster? You'd best go home early, and lock the door. There were fires. There was broken glass. There were cars overturned. In Arlington, Virginia, in the 'Sixties, white people thought they could count on The Coloreds to stay put--in their neighborhood of Hall's Hill, in janitorial positions. Until that day.

There've been so many other times. L.A., over Rodney King. Cincinnati. Ferguson. Baltimore. And on. And on. Nothing changes. It's hard to understand why everything's not on fire all the time. There's been restraint, I tell you.

So when I watched a car being overturned and set on fire in Minneapolis, it was familiar. But there's something different going on now.

Because one thing has been clear for a few years. There are people who want a race war in America. Or any other civil war. And I don't mean the dime-a-dozen racist assholes. They're just pieces. They can be swept off the board at any time and replaced just as fast. It's the rooks and the bishops running this show. They want us to fall apart, to kill each other.

I just don't know why.

I don't even know who they all are. Certainly Russians. They'll jam a wedge into any crack they can find. Vaccination. Guns. Race, for sure. They don't take a side. They take all the sides. It's easy to see why someone like Putin wants our fabric shredded.

The President of the United States wants civil war, too, though, and that's harder to fathom. Perhaps the explanation is simpler than it ought to be. He's an insecure ignoramus with no love for anybody, even his base, but rage lifts him up, fills his sails, tents his shorts. He doesn't respect any American citizen, and black and brown citizens are merely at the bottom of his basket of expendables. He, and the daughter he finds most doable, are the only people he almost cares about. This whole damn thing gives him a little chubby.

But he's also got an entire party behind him. With their own calculations.

Somehow or other, someone is calculating that when America falls apart for good, they'll get all the money. All the rest of the money. I'm not sure how, but I am sure. Are you seeing all those memes about the "right" and "wrong" way to protest? The photos of those nasty people setting fires, the looting? They're designed to be spread far and wide by earnest progressives and bigots alike. To make sure nobody misses the violence, to assure people that their assumptions about the dreaded Other were correct all along. There are people behind those creations. And those people don't give a damn about black lives. Or poor white lives, either. They want war. They want the spoils.

But they're not stopping with inflammatory posts on the social media. They're willing to invest living bodies. They've got mercenaries on the payroll, ready to step in at any time, whenever the tinder they've spread around gets lit. Mercenaries to begin the smashing, to spark the protests, to ensure the violence.

Naomi Klein, in her extraordinary book Shock Doctrine, explained how the plutocrats have been poised to exploit any shocking disaster, from hurricane to tsunami to terrorist event, to further their own rapacious ends; they have playbooks on hand and players ready to muster. They privatized the education system during the chaos of Katrina, they privatized the beaches and evicted the native fishermen after the tsunami in Indonesia. And if a disaster does not occur naturally, they'll engineer one: invade an irrelevant country after 9/11, when people were too shocked to mount an objection, and reap billions in profits. Stage a coup in Argentina and take over all the publicly owned utilities and companies. They've got playbooks, they've got players.

And that is how they can insert agents provocateurs into the protests in Minnesota. Just like that. They have them all ready to go. To incite, to divide, to conquer. Don't fall for it.