Like you, I am watching the world burn.
I was 15 when MLK and Robert Kennedy were murdered, when the cities burned, when Vietnam was killing 319 American soldiers a week and who knows how many Vietnamese men, women and children — thousands? — when George Wallace was giving a full throated roar to racial hatred, when the American government systematically lied to its people about the war, when Nixon and Kissinger undermined a potential peace agreement so Nixon could be elected ….
This time feels worse for more reasons than I can list here and because a list could never be complete enough.
The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the detonator of a explosive mixture whose composition is both immediate in its assembly and of a much, much longer production. Trying to construct a unified field theory for this moment is impossible. In 50 years there may be enough clarity to begin to sort out all the threads that led to the utter chaos and self-destruction of this moment but not now.
I have been reading lots of history in the past 3 months, especially books that describe the rise of the Nazis and their cult-like identification with Hitler, and on his destruction of European Jews. On the famine in the Ukraine in 1931-1932 that killed millions and on the Great Terror of 1937-1938 that again killed another million — both actions ordered by Stalin.
I’ve been trying to figure out how those societies went so wrong and in a weird way give myself hope that while this time in history looks bad, it is nothing like those three catastrophes.
But countries commit suicide in all kinds of ways. The Mayan civilization probably perished through an intersection of incessant civil war and through calamitous environmental degradation; the Greeks, again, through the Peloponnesian Civil War that lasted 27 years; the Romans through slavery and the karmic revenge of peoples long oppressed by the ruthless expansion of the Empire.
For Germany and Russia, their anti-human ideologies of Nazism and Communism, their insistence on racial and philosophical purity, their reliance on violence as the enforcer of government terror — all three factors were prime contributors to their suicide.
No binary 0 or 1 explanation of our drive toward self destruction makes sense. We either accept complexity and nuance in seeking explanations and solutions or we will be trapped within our competing systems of blindness and fear.
However, that said, one explanation is perfectly clear: as Americans, we either face up to the ingrained racism borne into this country in 1619 with the arrival of slaves in Jamestown or we will not survive as a democracy or a Union.
I have serious doubts about Joe Biden, but his statement on the murder of George Floyd is the best summation of this moment I have read. He described the killing as “an act of brutality so elemental, it did more than deny one more black man in America his civil rights and his human rights, it denied him of his very humanity, and it denied him of his life.”
“Every day African-Americans go about their lives with constant anxiety and trauma wondering who will be next. Imagine if every time your husband or son, wife or daughter left the house you feared for their safety from bad actors and bad police.”
“It’s long past time we made the promise of this nation real for all people,” Biden said. “It’s time for us to take a hard look at the uncomfortable truths. It’s time for us to face that deep open wound we have in this nation. We need justice for George Floyd.”
