Thoughts on America’s Current Civil Unrest

It is very possibly the design/intent of many of the current vandals and looters in assorted American cities to throw off the central narrative of the urgent need for racial (and economic) justice. However, we each have the choice to keep this recent heinous crime born of racism at the forefront of our minds in the face of what’s going on and to insist others do the same. We privileged white people owe that to our long oppressed Black and Brown fellow humans. Please don’t let all the smoke blur/confuse your mental vision or moral compass around the changes that need to happen. This latest ground swell of violence all started from yet another lynching of a defenseless Black man (George Floyd, pictured) and the lack of justice against this hate crime. There are surely agitators involved who wish to keep the status quo of systemic racism and there are the usual criminal opportunists out looting for their own immediate material gain. And then there are both the nonviolent and violent protestors who are sick of this oppression. Please let’s speak and act up against these ongoing wrongs, and not choose to be inactive so as to simply avoid being associated with violence and criminality when nonviolence is one’s preferred ethical course of action. Such deliberate inaction is acting from out of white privilege, or so I’ve come to understand.

I did see some film footage and accompanying written narrative of peaceful Black protesters in Minn. trying to dissuade white people from vandalizing and looting. Again, please don’t lose site of what’s at stake, especially for people of color.

I want to add that, coupled and intertwining with ongoing system racism, America’s economic structure has been strained to a breaking point. To my understanding, civil unrest such as what we’re currently seeing is what eventually arises from more and more disenfranchised people being juxtaposed up against increasingly concentrated wealth and power of a few. In my lifetime, this imbalance has only grown more extreme. And Drumpf’s divisive words and deeds keep just fueling the pent up rage and anguish so many people are going through, as misdirected as these visceral emotions are for some. This current chaos is a storm of a sort fueled by the need for a new and better, fairer order, racially and economically. The status quo won’t hold because it can’t, not at least if enough of us collectively want a truly working, thriving democratic republic.