It was almost 5 years ago that I wrote a post on this site related to the arrest and death of Sandra Bland: https://bigjolly.com/simple-traffic-stop-call-action/. That post sparked some interesting discussions in the comments to this site, on Facebook and other sites, face-to-face, and even led the Dallas Morning News to reprint a version in its online and print editions, which led to further comments. But soon afterwards, we all moved on.
Now, I again offer my condolences to another family—the family of George Floyd—who are left grieving after a tragedy that should not have happened.
As I’ve watched and listened to all that has transpired over the last week after the death of George Floyd, I sadly realize that very little has changed over the last 5 years, and that the same raw feelings that were aroused by the traffic stop, and its aftermath, in Waller County in 2015 have continued to boil just beneath the surface of our society. Now a lot of steam is escaping and many of us are left wondering, again, how we got here and how we will move forward.
Whatever might have justified the police officers’ original detention of George Floyd, nothing justified the actions taken by those officers after he was subdued. For some reason we may never know, any mercy for the neighbor those officers had in their custody slipped away during the 8-plus minutes caught on video. As we all watched the video with a degree of horror, it reinforced the fear and distrust that so many of our African-American neighbors have about the way they are perceived and treated by the rest of their fellow citizens. Although none of the looting and violence that followed is justified, the protests are justified; and the conversations they are sparking are long overdue and must continue.
Today, I am left with the same observation I made 5 years ago, but now with a sense of even greater urgency:
… It is a national tragedy that so many of our neighbors wake each morning believing that their countrymen don’t think they matter, and wondering whether they will live through that day. In fact, it is not just a tragedy—I agree with some of the leaders of #BlackLivesMatter movement when they call the current situation a “state of emergency.” …
Remember, if we truly believe in a limited federal government and in the power of families, the private sector and local governments to address most issues, our neighbors must trust each other and their local governments. That trust starts with each of us recognizing and protecting the humanity of all our neighbors, every day, in every situation. …
A progressive tide of politics has swept over the Democratic Party over the last 5 years since I made that observation, as has a populist tide washed over the Republican Party. The disunity fueled by these often opposite movements appears to have worsened recently in reaction to the deaths, lockdowns and economic hardships caused by the unexpected emergence of COVID-19. Now, in this context of disunity, history forces us also to confront what we failed to confront 5 years ago, let alone 50 or 100 years ago.
Frankly, I don’t know what mix of private and public action is needed at this time to address the fundamental issues raised by George Floyd’s death, or whether any mix of proposals would be acceptable right now to a majority of our politicians, let alone our citizens. So, I am left, for now, with a suggestion as to how to start the conversation.
Because this issue is so fraught with emotion, and opens such deep wounds for our society, maybe it is best to start with a proposition from those Founding Fathers who published the Virginia Declaration of Rights a few weeks before the Declaration of Independence:
… it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.
Or, as simply stated in the Gospel According to Matthew:
Do to men what you wish men do to you.
If these ideals for humane, compassionate action (shared, in one way or another, by most societies and religions in human history) guide our approach, I am confident we eventually will find our way through the current disunity and begin to address, once and for all, the distrust at the core of our current discontent with appropriate actions that retain the best of our society’s ideals, institutions, and traditions, while guiding us all to a better future.
Again, I have no idea what answers we will find along this journey, and, because of our ancestors’ failure to properly address this problem, we are left with few guideposts to follow. But I know we all must now take this journey in order for our society, and its ideals and promises, to endure. History will not be kind to us if we try to wait another 5 (or 50, or 100) years to start this journey.
meh it is not complicated, it is politics and as we are so often reminded, politics ain’t beanbag
It is now quite obvious that dems will do anything to regain their political power. Anything. I was 10 years old in 1968 and I recall the great push to embrace the dictates of LBJ’s Great Society. I recall all of the yammering we withstood about treating each other as equals, which since I was in church probably three days a week was a typical lesson. But that lesson has morphed.
Later came the burgeoning HUB/minority preference set aside rules. Then movies and TV went on depict most white men as either bumbling idiots or conniving criminals. It has advanced to the point public institutions now treat whites as so privileged they needed to be subjugated and males in general as being faulty females that need to be fixed.
Meanwhile black citizens continued to be exploited by their reliable political overseers that constantly pounded home the idea that whites were their enemies. So we sat at out dinner tables hearing our parents tell us how blacks really did get a raw deal back in the day while black fathers were absent and black mothers seethed at their station in life that relied on hand outs by their benevolent dem pols.
Today Obama’s agency heads are now being exposed as criminal grifters. Not news to me at all. They weaponized every agency against their political rivals. They brought guns to political knife fights. They are getting nervous and that makes them dangerous. That dems now openly court BLM, antifa is no shock since they can’t articulate their visions much less intentions so they have resorted to full on violence.
They tried Russian collusion for 3 years. That morphed into impeachment for obstruction for anther 6 months. WuFlu was an opportunity to distract with economic destruction. Now as that began to unravel we have to go back to 1968 to recreate racial divide. And I realize there are many on the left that profit handsomely from fomenting racial divide. They make the most noise at opportune times, but they are always ready to pounce.
There is nothing the dems, media, deep state, their enablers and their benefactors won’t do to stop this outsider from turning over the tables at their tabernacles of influence. They are caught. Their violent partners are ready to exploit their opportunities and it only takes a casual glance to note who is on their side.
It will not surprise me that there will be several gopers getting exposed in the mayhem too. Paul Ryan held hearings in 2017 that had testimony from several well known Obama agency leaders. Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Yates, Rice, Rhodes and so many others testified under oath they had no evidence of Russian collusion. Yet they have been and are still saying on any outlet that will let them say the exact opposite of their testimony with no pushback. Paul Ryan saw Devin Nunes declare they were exculpatory evidence to show there was no collusion and Ryan censored him for 9 months for peddling in classified documents while the dems ran wild, the 55 weak republicans retreated for the exits and the house flipped.
These are interesting times. It will be even more interesting as the election approaches. Let’s hope the dems don’t get an atomic weapon. That’s about all that’s left to launch against their political enemies.
What about the 24 plus policemen killed at the hands of thug anarchist Ed?
Jimmy,
I was taught “two wrongs don’t make a right;” so, as I said in my post, “none of the looting and violence that followed is justified,” including the death of police officers.
Your point, though, is not an excuse, or a counter-argument, to the need to address the despair and fears of many African-Americans who perceive that American society doesn’t value them.
In fact, much of the noise that is being made by both progressives and conservatives–focusing on the one hand on defunding or transforming police departments and creating even more bureaucratic programs that never seem to accomplish anything, or focusing on the other hand solely on the violence committed over the last week to 10 days–does nothing to address this basic problem in our country. This is not to say that police training, hiring and retention policies can’t be improved, or that perpetrators of the violence should not be arrested and prosecuted. But, the preoccupation on these issues allows both sides of our political discourse to escape to their comfortable corners and continue to claim the other is wrong (and even evil), without ever addressing the core problem–and will eventually make the core problem even worse.
So, I agree that the violence inflicted on the police, as well as on private citizens–just like the similar violence that occurred during the urban protests of the 1960s–is both wrong and makes the condition in many poor neighborhoods even worse than it was before triggering events like George Floyd’s death. Chaos and violence just breeds animosity, and never leads to a good result. But, we must not be so distracted by our animosity toward that wrong, that we continue to avoid the core problem that I discussed 5 years ago, and in this post.
Ed