Is this sadness or anger? Is there a difference?

Black Lives Matter protesters chant, “We have a duty to fight. We have a duty to win. We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

The past few months have been very hard. That’s an understatement, of course, but it bears mentioning.

For the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic my almost daily involvement with the Pasadena Tenants Union has given me an outlet for my anxiety and fear that I and my neighbors would experience illness, displacement, or worse. Being engaged kept me from spinning out in isolation, merely worrying about the crisis with nothing I could actually do.

I’ve listened in on city council meetings, attended organizing meetings of my tenants union and other state and national organizations who are organizing to keep our communities housed in a context where housing is the number one way to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Then came the nationwide uprisings following the May 25 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The picture of the crisis that has faced our country for decades came into fresh relief. The death of George Floyd, and the scores of others Black and Latinx men and women, is the result of over-policing, but also underfunding everything else, including housing, education, health care, mental heath resources, public transportation, and basically everything else you can think of.

One significant cause of police brutality is the criminalization of so called “quality of…