Strange Position to Take

Guilty, surely.  Guilty as charged.  Guilty in my heart.  Academically alight with ideas and references but physically inert.  I’ve been studying the slave trade and I’m ten books straight now, into the indignity.  More books came yesterday.  I’m piling it on as I want to somehow make the enormity inescapable and my perspective steeped in this tragedy not as an inconvenient truth, but as a beacon that generally informs all of what it shines upon the American experience. 

And I am guilty of something like apathy, surrounding the death of George Floyd.  Another video of a hapless African American man murdered by the police.  There have been so many.  In a fateful voice: "there will be more."   It is, not unlike the numbness I feel, (we feel?) when yet another group of people are shot en masse by an armed gunman.  It’s horrible and it’s wrong and no one seems to be able to do anything definitive about it because this violence is all rather American.  The real nectar that renews the roots of the Second Amendment isn't myth of the tricornered minutemen, whose relevance to defend us against tyrannical  invaders was always idealistic, it was the practical maintenance of a paramilitary force to keep slaves from rebelling and to later enforce Jim Crow, rejuvenated generationally that put to primacy the right to bear arms. 

In the first day or two after the murder, I believe I subconsciously assumed it would play its course.  People would protest and some would riot and then it would vanish.  I had been focused on Hong Kong, and on U.S. China relations and this, I suggested something to the effect, of “this happens from time to time and America can withstand this can improve from this pull upon the fabric.”  What a strange position to take.  “America has been through worse, and this is an indelible stain on the national cloth which is only ever addressed in fits and starts. This will challenge America and perhaps change America, but it won't overwhelm America.  Not, the way I suggested, might more likely happen in China.  What do I know?

The pandemic isolation, has in part, left me numb and alone.  The nation, wounded after three plus years of Trump’s shambolic charade, the country having lost more than twice the number of casualties as the entire Vietnam War, in a matter of months, people out of work, people broke, people tired and worried and now very angry.  Distance from our neighbors helps to numb what it is we feel, I suspect. I would like to take my girls to a protest.  I need to speak with others, who are not just type- on-text. And we are not supposed to form groups for our collective safety.  My girls remind me of this.  It strikes me how odd the national conversation is with seemingly no one, anywhere, embodying leadership role.   Where are the voices in any community to crystalize the frustration and counsel the passions?  Why do I need to hear such a call?

Sunday 05/31/20
(properly posted 16 days before this appears)