Washington Square Park, NYC
As I’m writing this, there have been twelve straight nights of protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd (plus a few centuries of slavery, torture, racism, disenfranchisement, hatred). The collective pain and suffering has been so acute that there has been an enormous, and necessary, receding of everything else. The brokenness of seemingly every system has become plain to most people (at least I hope this is so; it’s likely arguable), except the most recalcitrant, racist and unseeing. The video of George Floyd is a vortex, a portal into untold stories of oppression and violence; I wept when I saw it. Other images have been on replay in my mind, including the thuds of police batons on protesters’ bodies, humans against humans, a 75-year-old activist lying on a sidewalk as blood pools from his ear, the bizarre footage of Trump with the upside-down bible in front of St. John’s church; this last image is remarkable to me for how surprising I found it, in spite of how in keeping it is with this president’s cartoonish rhetorical tendencies. I don’t know how I can still be surprised, but there it is (the problem of calling him cartoonish, however, is that it elides just how malevolent and destructive he is; the effect of his words and actions has reached the deepest level, while “cartoon” keeps him only on the surface).
We now find ourselves in a world so inflamed that we are in a literal portrait of hell; except that we were always here. Ages and ages this has been curdling and roiling just under the surface, held by a vastly racist network of systems on one side and something (wrongly) called politeness on the other. Say nothing, look the other way, don’t ruffle feathers, keep quiet in your corner. Now there is a gaping rent in the entire fabric through which all the due rage, suffering and unhappiness—the sprawling and intricate inequality—is escaping, no longer willing to be held under.
This cataclysm was perhaps inevitable; now it certainly seems necessary, if we’re ever to forge something better (though there are plenty of people, rightly cynical, who feel that better will never come). The collective howl is so extraordinary, so vociferous and pain-filled that there is something symphonic about it. A raging, thumping, bombastic series of cries and protestations that is coming in tune with itself. The process has been volatile, but what else is there? For the society that has been so dead asleep, so gleeful in its hierarchies or seemingly unaware of them, the alarm bell is now sounding without the option of a snooze setting.
The denial of anger runs deep. So, too, the denial of truth. What has changed everything is the simple and ubiquitous cell phone video—video taken by people with the courage to record. A story of a man held down by his neck for eight minutes until he died, right there on a public street, is no longer just a story when there is live footage of it. And not just still-photography, either, but the animated approach of death, Floyd’s voice as he said he couldn’t breathe, someone telling him to get up as if he wasn’t pinned to the ground by a terrible knee. Somehow story can be denied, but this is harder to do with moving images and actual voices (I listened last night, however, to a professor of criminal justice, who was once also a police officer, talk about how jurors can watch a video that clearly shows a murder by police and still come away saying it wasn’t murder). Similarly, the 75-year-old man who was shoved to the ground was originally described as having “tripped and fallen” until the video showed otherwise. As much as we can rail against the sometimes overwhelming nature of technology and its intrusions, it is people brave enough to use that technology who have unveiled what has always been in front of us and made our current moment possible.
And here’s the thing of this current moment: we’re suspended in it, carried in a stream so powerful that it will hopefully finally force people to let go, of old ideas, old habits of thinking, old biases, and embrace something else (each other? this is too much of a leap and simplistic maybe). Which reminds me that this is all unfolding when we’re in our separations and isolations, in our masks, and yet there are now millions of people, shoulder to shoulder, making a demand for change. And change happens whether or not we orchestrate it—it’s an energy and inevitable force of its own; now there is an opportunity for all of society, every facet, to be aligned with it.