Watching the Country Fall Apart

It's been a week of horrors. Perhaps the worst was the video of the murder of Floyd George (kneeling on a person's carotid artery is sure to cut off the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain). This callous murder of a man who had been subdued (for no good reason) by four officers of the law was bad enough, but it also put into sinister light the Central Park confrontation between an irate white woman and the African-American birder who told her that she should leash her dog... she knew she was potentially 'calling in a hit'. Predictably, the cop who bears the most responsibility for the murder of Floyd George has a history of prior misconduct allegations. It's appalling how the good cops out there don't police their own, and allow the bad cops to besmirch the reputation of all cops.

Now, Minneapolis is the scene of a major, multi-day riot, complete with looting and arson... though, in a very twisted turn of events, the most publicized looting may very well have been kicked off by an undercover cop... that's a $250 respirator he's wearing, not the sort of thing that some rando would sport. There are also far-right Civil War 2.0 accelerationists infiltrating the crowds of protestors. It seems that Minneapolis, a city I remember fondly from a visit two decades ago, won't see peace for the foreseeable future.

In New York's Union Square, a protest was met with an aggressive police response, while on the other coast, a massive protest blocked roadways. This is going to be a summer of rage, most of it righteous rage, and I really don't see any coherent response to it, at least judging by what's going down in Minnesota. Cooler heads are needed to sort out the systemic problems of racist police procedures, but I don't think that there are any cooler heads in positions of authority.