The Virus of Inaccuracy
The graphic details of George Floyd’s killing have served to ignite what was waiting to blow up.
by David Applefield
Watching George Floyd die continues to be tragic and upsetting. I am embarrassed by the prolonged cruelty and cowardice of uniformed policemen. Once more our trust in authority designed to protect and serve fellow citizens has been breeched.
So many of us across the country feel this way. My own mother, an 85 year old white woman sat on the curb in her suburban town in Massachusetts yesterday with a sign: “We didn’t learn anything. I survived the Holocaust.”
So when I watch angry comments flutter in on social media focused on how unacceptable the looting is, and I read the lame narrative that the President is pushing out, diffusing responsibility and scapegoating outsiders who want to destroy America, the urge to correct the injustice and flatten the virus of inaccuracy becomes urgent. Those who complain that the nightly street violence is not about honoring George Floyd anymore, as if the meaning of our national outrage has been lost to looters, they need to be corrected.
Martin Luther King reminded us that it won’t be until the white majority feels that racial injustice is not in their interest that change will occur. The outrage in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, and Asbury Park, mostly peaceful, is no longer only about the senseless death of George Floyd, the 46 year old black man, who had been anonymous, the object of no attention at all, only one week ago. Today, he has been immortalized by the steady hand of a 17 year old girl with the good sense to aim her cell phone at Derek Chauvin as he pressed his knee onto the neck of a handcuffed, gasping black man, asphyxiating him.
The name George Floyd has spiraled into a symbol of growing power and influence across an injured nation and a shocked world, a world that suffers when the America that symbolizes personal freedom lets them down. Literally, Mr. Floyd laid his neck on the pavement, and his final words “I can’t breathe” have entered living history with a vitality and urgency that continues to crescendo, and will not be forgotten. That cry of despair resonates with injustice and a long and unresolved history of racial disparity. That cry and those images are progressively awakening the conscience of millions of Americans who are already stressed by the unprecedented spread of a deadly virus and the menace of unemployment and economic hardship. George Floyd’s cry emboldens disenfranchised Americans’ will to act — Americans of all colors and ages, employed, unemployed, retired, as well as the many who’ve never worked.
Our stake in our Republic has been insulted by not only profiling and systemic prejudice, but also by an obscene concentration of wealth and power. So many of our neighbors are battling for dignity, disadvantaged by a deadly pandemic, unable to access fairly-priced health care, suffering from higher rates of disease from unregulated toxins in the air and water, craving better experiences in our resource-depleted school systems, and earning inadequate wages that cannot sustain a decent life.
Everyone with a conscience is being invited to step out into the public space and proclaim with their presence that “this normal” is not the normal that we can or are willing to return to. The violence of fire, broken glass, and looted stores should not be taken lightly, but neither should it replace or overshadow the truth of what has instigated the disruption.
We all need confidence in a better tomorrow, and trust in a future that has structural and attitudinal change. Most law enforcement officers understand this and agree. Many are kneeling with the legitimate protesters. George Floyd and the graphic details of his killing have served to ignite what was waiting to blow up. There are multiple George Floyds that we do not talk about, whose names we are not pronouncing, many are black and brown, and many are white. They are afraid of not only being the next; they are already on the ground, afraid that a medical visit will ruin them. Afraid of being harassed and afraid that they’ll lose their job if they complain.
Fortunately, many good Americans largely agree that this is the precise moment to defend decency, to speak up, to attend in personally meaningful ways the larger funeral procession of a fallen citizen. It is time to hold out a hand to those whose necks could have been knelt on, or who are quietly screaming ‘I can’t breathe.’ I need a job. I pay an unfair amount of taxes. My meds are too high. Our food is making us sick.
The manifestations of anger, sadness, social commentary, and even vandalism and looting (as wrong and ugly as that is) — are expressions of an accumulated, unsustainable system that have weakened the institutions conceived to defend the common good. A nation invented to honor and protect the rights of its citizens, I believe, will not permit its own social experiment to be torched by a morally-frail president if we find the enthusiasm for change.
There is nothing more profoundly American, even with its reckless disruption, than the spontaneous expressions of rebellion. George Floyd, beneath that perverse knee of abusive power, has enabled an entire nation and a global economy to reconsider the consequences of inequality. The spirit of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, wrongly argued as the legitimate protection of the firearms industry, essentially safeguards the right of citizens to defend themselves from tyrants who threaten their liberty. ‘Give me liberty or give me death’, the iconic call to action by revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry, echoes in “I can’t breathe.” George Floyd will never know how he shattered complacency in America, but across this union, black and white and brown citizens, brothers and sisters, poor and rich and mostly in the middle, are reclaiming America’s original promise.
David Applefield lives in Red Bank, NJ and is running for Congress in NJ4 (www.applefield4congress.com)
