The Isolation Diaries No. 37

“MAGA loves the black people.” Donald J. Trump

Complicit too long. Silent too long. Indifferent too long. And as night follows day, the moment of reckoning is here. The dream of justice and equality for African-Americans, for indigineous people, for immigrants from Latin America and Asia, so long deferred, punted, kicked down the proverbial road for the next generation to deal with, is here. As Dr. Cornel West put it, “This is America’s moment.”

For me, the most striking, astonishing aspect of this moment is the outrageous, inexcusable behavior of police forces all across this country. It’s not the actions of citizens, it’s the police in their riot gear, with their tear gas and mace and pepper spray and rubber bullets and flash grenades, it’s the police driving their vehicles into crowds of people, throwing people to the ground, shooting at journalists and camera crews, much like American soldiers and Marines did to the citizens of Fallujah in Iraq and all over Afghanistan for most of the past two decades. Americans don’t understand that a nation cannot be violent abroad and peaceful at home. 

Violence is our fetish, our juice, our faith, our mojo. I think I finally understand what Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian are all about.    

We must connect the dots between decades of economic, tax (the wealthy paying less and less), and trade policies, lumped under the umbrella of neoliberalism, with obscene, reckless, and wasteful military spending, a global apparatus of more than 800 military bases, with relentless privatization and under-funding of public services and spaces like libraries, hospitals, and schools. The political and economic masters of this country are so compromised by hubris that they forced a cruel starvation diet on the people and expected them to take it without so much as a whimper. 

The people are angry, demoralized, fed up, scared, tired of crappy jobs that pay a poverty wage, tired of going bankrupt when they become ill, as all people will, tired of being ignored by the powerful. Most of all, people are done with the hypocrisy of the American ruling class. 

We’re in the middle of a confluence, like the point where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. Treacherous waters. First, the pandemic, then the economic impact of shutting most of the country down, and then the murders: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and finally, the sadistic killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, captured on camera like Murder Porn. The world saw it, and this time there was no way to explain it away, excuse it on some technicality, or claim the officer feared for his life. Not this time. 

Nothing more is required of black people. They aren’t required to get over slavery, to tolerate glorification of the Confederacy, to forgive the KKK. They have endured for centuries, marched, prayed, sang, contributed economic and cultural riches to this nation that can never be repaid.

To be clear about the American situation requires courage and honesty. Look not to the political elite, most of whom are more concerned about their tenure in office, their  appearance on Face the Nation, their next reelection campaign, and their investment portfolios than they are over the death of another black man. They say the right things but have no intention of turning their words into actions. Our president is the Coward-in-Chief, so limited and twisted as a human being that his one response to every problem is the same: domination. As long as someone else is wielding deadly force, Trump has an insatiable appetite for violence. 

Nothing more is required of black people. They aren’t required to get over slavery, to tolerate glorification of the Confederacy, to forgive the KKK. They have endured for centuries, marched, prayed, sang, contributed economic and cultural riches to this nation that can never be repaid. I’m a 61-year-old white male and the thought of a white dominated America fills me with terror; what a wasteland it would be. No, it’s on us white folks now, we’re the ones who have to get our minds and hearts right, to finally and forever renounce the idea that we are superior, chosen, anointed, selected, and born to rule. Peace and justice go together, but one cannot exist without the other. That’s the critical balance that’s missing in America. We have no peace in this moment because we who have power and money and networks have denied for too long the basic humanity of non-white people. Derek Chauvin is just the latest in a long, twisted line of racist cops. Chauvin not only sought to subdue George Floyd, he meant to dominate him. 

I listened to Gil Scott-Heron this morning and this caught my ear:

“And now it is your turn,

We are tired of praying, and marching, and thinking, and learning

Brothers wanna start cutting, and shooting, and stealing, and burning

You are three hundred years ahead in equality

But next summer may be too late.”

America is burning today, but the fire started long ago. What will we do this time, tamp it down or finally put it out?