I’ve struggled much of today trying to decide how best to write this. But this isn’t something that can really be encapsulated with a witty headline or some clever wordplay. All that I can manage is a stream of consciousness, so here goes.
Firstly, I have no evidence of what transitioned the event from peaceful protest to violent and destructive rioting. I’ve heard a ton of accusations. I’ve seem a ton of finger pointing. But I don’t know.
Was it the police finally getting sick of it? No clue. Protesters having enough and escalating on their own? No idea. Outside influences deciding this was their chance to throw gasoline on the fire? Couldn’t say.
And I’m not even going to judge anyone on the side of the protests if they were the ones to up the stakes. Frankly… nothing else has gotten White America to listen. We’ve happily ignored police brutality because it’s never happened in our gentrified enclaves.
We had no problem picking up our guns, and storming the state capitol building, and presumably would have had no problems using them, all because we’ve been told to stay home for the last month and a half. But we’re going to sneer disdainfully at people who have watched their brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and sons and daughters killed for decades? Fuck off with that nonsense.
I personally witnessed police harass my mother into paranoia, because they decided they needed to protect my father’s integrity during a messy divorce. And we were a lower-middle class YUPPIE family. You think they aren’t going to circle the wagons here? Just like they have every other time they crossed the line?
I see the Medical Examiner in Minneapolis already trying to run cover for the murderer. Because apparently, the police officer isn’t guilty because the victim wasn’t healthy enough to be strangled for almost nine minutes. And we wonder why those at the bottom of society protest, or why those protests would escalate into rioting.
And at the end of the day, my home town about 450 miles away, burned because of those crimes. And I can’t say with complete honesty that we didn’t have it coming.
We all have it coming. Wake the fuck up and change.
#blacklivesmatter
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