Protests

The above meme is about Lorelei joking after Rory was the cause of a fight at a house party that wrecked things up. Rory is mortified, and Lorelei can joke with her. Lorelei had Rory when she was 16 and Rory strove to be the perfect child to help her mother not be stressed out. Lorelei acts like a friend to her because they are not that far in age. The tension of the show is that Rory likes the rich trappings of her grandparents, and Lorelei identifies more with the workers. It brings the family back together, but that is a challenge to the family that split apart for a reason.

I have some nostalgia about protests, my parents supposedly marched in protest with me in a stroller. At Wisconsin I left the library and joined a divest from S. Africa until apartheid is over. My uncle left Madison on the day the building blew up, which is featured in the War At Home, about the protests about Vietnam.  

In 2020, the hindsight year, there are protests around the world when George Floyd, the straw that broke the camel's back (List of law enforcement killings). He died May 25th 2020. Today is July 30th.

There have been debates about the mathematics of it all by conservatives. If more blacks commit crimes, there will be more than the 13% representation of deaths. 

If you have the insight into the connection between slavery, prejudice, and economics, poverty and crime, and you're a liberal like me, the videos of police killing people is problem. Nobody should be killed by cops, not even guilty people. He was being arrested for a counterfeit $20. He was a big man who played college football and basketball.  

To be sure it looks like George Floyd was subdued, and no more force was needed when the officer kneeled on his neck. He warned the cops that he couldn't breath. Of course a cop will say you can't say that if you're really suffocating. His last words he sputtered were, "moma". Mothers around the world were activated when he called on mothers. Protests broke out around the world. The protests continue today.

Conservative point to the property damage. Liberals will point to the shooting into protesters and cars driven into protesters. The big bowl of wrong has expanded. Trump has created a secret police force which has been kidnapping people off the streets. Portland has become a center of heated protests.

Conservatives have created memes about the weirdness of supporting lawlessness. There's been some accusations by the left that the right has gone in to commit crimes to discredit the movement. Black Lives Matter has been painted as a Marxist organization. Colin Kaepernick is famous for kneeling during the national anthem, along with others, and it sparked a movement to protest prejudices in American society, including all the recent video tapes of cops killing people. Now everyone in the MLS kneels before a game. Seems to be a lot of kneeling, it has become more acceptable. Many are even questioning whether the national anthem should be played before every major sporting event.

The technology of videos of cops killing black people has exposed what surely has been going on for a while. 

There are other mysterious murders like Breonna Taylor. She was a corrections officer who was shot on a no-knock search warrant, while she slept. Wikipedia: "...Gunfire was exchanged between Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker and the officers. Walker said that he believed that the officers were intruders. The LMPD officers fired over twenty shots. Taylor was shot eight times." Police were returned fire, they did not fire first. There was a suspicion of drugs for various reasons, but there were no drugs found in the house. Ms. Taylor might have had a relationship with a drug dealer in the past, which is why the house was being searched. It was suspected that she received packages in the past that were drugs.

When you look more into these cases, they are not as cut and dry as the idea that they just broke into her house and shot her while she was sleeping. The police did not fire first. But she paid the price. 

These cases bring up the question of police violence. The officer who shot Ahmaud Arbery was suspended because he would not take a class on the use of appropriate force. Arbery was shot while jogging in a white neighborhood.

I could go on and on exploring various cases, but these cases highlight the kind of violence we have in America. They are not so clear, George Floyd had a record. But the police are not supposed to carry out sentences, they are supposed to make arrests, and have trials. 

Because with the Covid-19 quarantines, many people have the time to protest. Many have lost their jobs. There's a kind of social unrest that is not captured in the choice between Biden and Trump on November 3rd. 

As Republicans point out the cities are run by democratic mayors. Urban centers are concentrations of poverty, and poverty brings problems like eviction, drug use and criminal means for gathering money. Someone like me who thinks everyone should have a universal income, there should be good public housing, good schools everywhere, and not just rich school districts, public transportation should be encouraged and subsidized. These boiling points are just the tip of the iceberg of potential justice.

I met a fellow who claimed to be liberal but asserted that women pumped out children for more benefits, not because they didn't have access to birth control, or because there were educational deficits, or other reasons. My feeling having worked with many poor families in child welfare, was that anyone who thought they were getting rich pumping out babies is crazy. The meager benefits kept being cut on whims, and it was hard to get established within the system. A woman who lived in her mother's apartment with all her children hoped to get he own apartment in the building. What I saw were a lot of people who would have liked better entitlements, but were not getting much. They were not living large. They did not seem to be exploiting the system but in real need. 

We are so ambivalent about helping people in need. We prefer to blame, like our policy towards substance abuse. If substance abuse is decriminalized, like it was in Portugal when they took it out of the politicians hands and put in into the experts hands, prostitution disappeared, and the spread of AIDs through needles was eliminated. Substance abuse is a complex problems and doesn't yield to easy solutions. But it's a victimless crime when children are not involved. Even when children are involved, child welfare has mixed results. I saw people getting away with murder, and I saw some held accountable. When people were held accountable, there were mixed results. I met so many people who were abused in foster care when I was a therapist. Of course that's not a scientific sample, but it makes you think. I also met angels who raised kids nobody else wanted. It's a messy old world, but I don't get the sense that a politician judging from afar has the best sense of what should be done. You'll win votes by judging the out people. Othering is encouraged by the current president. 

Meanwhile the generation of civil rights activists are passing. John Lewis, a prominent civil rights activist and politician from Georgia in the House of Representatives, passed away July 17th. There have been many memorials to him, I have seen his casket being carried a few times on the TV recently. Trump, a known racist, has said he would not attend any memorial. Obama made a speech today for the memorial, that I caught on TV. That's my kind of leadership. He's talking about basic democracy.

So what we have is a complex mishmosh of various forces, peaceful protests, property destroying protests, attacks from the right, attacks from the left on the protests. I found it funny that after defunding education, transportation, food for the poor, housing, that people were up in arms about defunding the police, like they are the only ones who can't be defunded. You have police officers telling liberals to not call 911 in an emergency, like they are only police for their choice of citizens, the way the president only started caring about Covid-19 when it effected his base. I know Trump has exposed an ugly underbelly to America, but I think we still deserve better government. And the right to protest seems fundamental to me, growing up revering the protests about Vietnam, which actually finally got the USA out of a place they never belonged. Screw the domino theory, just outperform and let Russia collapse in and of itself. 

Meanwhile China and Turkey and Syria commit terrible crimes against their own peoples and tell the rest of the world to mind their own business. America is no longer cop of the world, but Obama's intervention to keep Ebola in the 3 African countries it was plaguing is in stark contrast to what Trump has done, which is grudgingly acknowledge that masks save lives after several months of being told it would.

I think it's possible to like the non-violent protests agitating for more justice, condemn the lawlessness by both the police and the citizens. I think it's possible to see complex forces not easily yielding to easy solutions but to hope there could be solutions. It's possible to believe quality education and services for the citizens could greatly help the citizens. We don't need everyone in perpetual terror of losing their job and health insurance, fear of eviction, loss of a good school district and on and on and on. Life is a struggle, a fight, but I would like the virtue of kindness represented in our government. 

I don’t agree with this meme but it is better than most.