Civil unrest has engulfed the country, and we have no one but ourselves to blame.
We have elected a racist president who supports racist policies and has enacted a racist agenda. It was only a matter of time until the people fought back.
A black man, accused of the non-violent act of counterfeiting, gets essentially curb-stomped on camera, and it takes prosecutors four days to charge the officer with a crime, and only after protesters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct demanding justice. Many doubt the cop will be convicted.
A few states over, in Louisville, a black female nurse gets shot in her own bed after the police mistakenly bust into her house thinking they’re entering a drug den. Still no charges or arrests in that case.
In Georgia, it took three months and the release of a video before any arrests were made in the murder of a black man jogging down the street, minding his own business.
But here is what the police are apparently skilled at doing: Arresting a CNN journalist of color and his entire film crew live on TV. Their crime: reporting on an empty street in Minneapolis. On the same day, police shot pepper balls at another reporter who was doing her job in Louisville.
What have we become?
The police in this country have been allowed to militarize themselves and run amok for years, and when the Justice Department finally stepped in to put a stop to it at the end of the Obama administration, in came Donald Trump to undo the progress. Now, after 3½ years, the fuse has finally been lit.
After all the verbal attacks on black football players, ripping migrant children of color away from their parents and locking them up on the border, and defending white supremacists at every turn, this is what we get. A nation in chaos.
The general wisdom is that a president can’t do that much damage in just four years. Donald Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that is not the case. As we stumble toward November, more than 100,000 people have died in a pandemic that has disproportionately hit people of color, because of their lack of access to health care, and the streets of several major cities are in flames. A curfew in Minneapolis on Friday was completely ignored, and nobody dared step in to stop the mayhem.
People are irate, and they have every right to be. Something is seriously wrong in this country, and it starts with the lack of leadership at the top.
With Trump already giving clear signals that he intends to do everything in his power to suppress the vote and accept foreign assistance to swing the election, and perhaps not accept the results if they still don’t go his way, we should all fear for what is coming in five months.
This week’s protests and riots may just be a harbinger of far worse days ahead.