Dispatch 1
Sunday, May 31st, 2020. The fire started in Minneapolis has sparked flames across the nation. Day-time protests demanding justice for George Floyd, the umpteenth unarmed black man to be murdered by police, turn to night-time riots, complete with tear gas, rubber bullets, looting, and fires.
This is happening against the backdrop of 3 months of a viral global pandemic, and an almost perfectly botched US response to it, courtesy of 3 years of a Trump regime that has succeeded in, if nothing else, gutting the federal government's ability to do anything besides mercilessly enrich its insiders.
As I write this, the National Guard has arrived in San Francisco to enforce the prescribed parameters for peaceful protest, and I myself have just come back to the city in a more motley caravan of leftist vagrant youths, descending from the hills to support the push against those parameters.
As we, and doubtlessly countless others around the country, flocked towards our respective urban centers for the big show(down?), in a sudden reversal of every impulse and habit that have been developed over the last three months of social-distancing, the questions mount as the odometers climb. For one, what is all this about?
The tragedy of George Floyd's murder in and of itself should not be glossed over here - it is a horrible and helpless loss to his family and those close to him. The national outrage however, is clearly about more than mourning the loss of George Floyd as an individual, and the frustrated demand for justice does not merely apply to the officer who murdered him.
It is instead, or at least it seems to me, a widespread rejection of a lie - the lie that police brutality in general, and the racial aspect of it specifically, is somehow accidental or anomalous, and not the systemic results of the way the police are recruited, trained, funded, and so forth (in short, the lie that police brutality is not essentially produced by the structure of "the police" as an institution).
As for the justice being demanded? The officer who murdered Floyd has been arrested and charged, and the mayor and governor seem happy to focus the blame on these one-to-four individuals, in the hope that the buck stops there - happy to sacrifice these officers to public crucifixion and praying that satisfies the mob. Will it be enough? Should it be?
My observation so far is that this thing, that is at its core about systemic and racialized police brutality, is quickly becoming about everything else - about the last three months, being laid off by the tens of millions and ordered to stay home indefinitely while the federal government pretends its helping by printing trillions of dollars for corporate shareholders and outbidding the states for medical supplies.
And the state governors, bless their hearts, have been near-bankrupted by the process of trying to fend off a global pandemic while the federal government at best does nothing out of incompetence, and at worst directly undermines the states for private profits - and with a looming deadline to fork over the years' tax dollars to the fed, they have to consider spending the dregs of their budgets on the restoration of "law and order".
The sun has set now, curfews are being imposed and ignored across the country. Washington DC is on fire and the president is hiding lamely in a bunker while Anonymous leaks damning document after damning document. The people are in the streets and on the offensive, and the government is essentially in retreat or struggling to break up the crowds - which perhaps they do here and there, temporarily. But what is becoming evident is that this flood of protest is not receding any time soon. The crowds will be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on.
Stay tuned,
Your Begrudging Servant,
Spider S Thompson
