You Do Not Care About George Floyd

This means you.

You never heard of him until he was dead.

You have no hole in your life created by his absence.

You would not care a fig for his passing if it had not been captured on video and cast throughout the world. His individuality, struggles, failures, and triumphs are gone, never to return while the earth lasts.

He is nothing to you but a symbol, a meme, a bell rung to a Pavlov-trained dog, triggering you to say and act as you have been conditioned to. What his family remembers and what they say he would have wanted mean nothing to you. You do not even process them. They are locked away in that part of your brain where irreconcilable facts go.

You don’t care if the cop that killed him is punished or not. You will do and say exactly the same things regardless of what happens. You will issue solemn banalities — and pressure others to do the same — on social media even if the cop gets the chair. You will claim that there is no peace until there is justice, and will frame these concepts only in the vaguest terms. You will justify — or even commit — acts of violence, because Now is the Time for that.

Because.

You don’t care what the cities look like afterwards. You don’t care who suffers as a result. You cannot even begin to consider the human cost of “mostly peaceful” protests. You have only a name — George Floyd — and the anger and righteousness it triggers in you.

You are a foot soldier, a meme carrier, a data capsule. You are swept along by the tide and think your righteous longings will absolve you. When the hammer falls, when this plays out according to it’s logical conclusions, you will be baffled.

In 1992 the Rodney King riots happened when the four cops were acquitted of assault and battery. They did not happen as soon as the video surfaced. Today we accelerate. Today we erupt because we live on the internet and the internet tells us what to feel.

What we feel is hatred — for the land of our birth.

What we project is fury— at any heretic who does not join us.

What we are is — sheep.