This essay was initially going to contain two factors that contributed to George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police department, but another came to mind, and felt I needed to expand the scope of the treatise to include it. The three factors I will explore are: Racism, The Deal, and Our Endless wars. These, of course are only three of many factors that helped to bring us to our current state of crisis, but I am limiting my observations to these three. I will then offer a few concluding remarks. To be clear; when I use the term crisis, I do not mean the massive protests sweeping across this country. The crisis is the wanton murder of American citizens by a bloated and viciously violent police force.
Racism:
Racism is not and American phenomenon. Racism is a human phenomenon. It is, I believe, endemic to our species, and may even be written into our genome. Consider this, we are an animal species that congregates in packs and herds. We call them societies and communities, but when we boil this down to its constituent elements, that is what our groupings are; packs and herds. Other mammals that congregate in such a manner always shun and act against the intrusion of an outsider. Humans are no different.
Humanity has spent a lot of energy throughout its existence trying to overcome this scourge and, barring that, at least minimize its effect on how we conduct our lives. We will never completely eliminate racism from human society, but it is one of the most worthwhile endeavors we, as a species and as individuals, could ever undertake. The human world has made great strides and continuous progress in this effort to be inclusive of each other. Many of our sister countries in Europe continue to do so, even under the pressure of right-wing groups that seek to undermine this effort.
Others are moving forward, but the United States of America is moving backward, and we are moving backward at an alarming rate of speed. We are so far back in time on issues of race, now, that black Americans are murdered in white-initiated hate crimes at an insanely high rate. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery is just the latest example.
Many have said that Arbery shouldn’t have resisted, when confronted by two white men carrying guns. There may have been a time in the American South when that was true [okay, stop laughing]…There has never been such a time. So, consider this, A black teenager is jogging through a mainly white area in the American South, two white guys confront him by pointing guns at him. He knows that the only way he will survive the confrontation is to, if possible, wrest one of these guns from one of the white guys and defend himself on somewhat equal footing. Short of that, he knows that they’re going to kill him; for the sport of it if nothing else.
The worst part of the issue of race in America is that we now have a president who stands firmly with the two white guys in the scenario above. The president of the United States depends upon the solid voting block of southern, Christian, “white power” racists. These people make up a large portion of his base constituency, and he is as faithful to them as Mary was to Jesus.
Racism in America today is propelled by not only what seems to be its endemic, natural part of the human species, but now it is also supported and bolstered by the highest office of the executive branch of the US government.
The Deal:
Long ago, America made a deal. That deal was that it is okay for cops to kill people. The origins of this deal are shrouded in mystery, because the deal isn’t written down anywhere. It’s not quantified, or codified in any recognizable manner, but it is there. We all, as Americans, know that it is there. Not all societies, especially Western societies have made such a deal, but America has, and this is the main reason why we live in the most violent society humanity has ever known.
It has been propelled in many ways, and not the least of which is Hollywood. American television and film is rife with with cops killing people. Most people the cops kill in television and film, are “bad guys,” but there is, occasionally the collateral damage, average person, who just happens to take a cop’s bullet. Either way, it always ends up a ‘righteous kill.’
When I consider this issue of The Deal being propelled by Hollywood, I have the image from the end of the movie “48 Hours.” Particularly, the scene in which our main bad guy is charging at Nick Nolte’s character, and Nick Nolte stands there, expressionless, and starts shooting the guy. He doesn’t hit the guy center-mass once, but stands there firing round after round at him, and he doesn’t miss once, He unloads somewhere around six bullets into the guy, and afterwards, everything’s cool. Yeah, everything is cool, and he goes home and has a good night’s rest; it’s been a tough case.
On top of this basic problem of our entertainment industries glorifying the killing of people by cops, you have also the glorification of killing in general. Take any number of series from American television, and the glorification of killing is at the core of it. All of your westerns, almost all of your police shows (except Barney Miller), and many others. How do we solve problems in America? With a bullet…or six.
Regarding cops and their relationship to The Deal, the problem is this; once you tell cops that it’s okay for them to kill people, they’re going to start killing people. Eventually, they will not only kill people, but they will begin to kill people with impunity. This is because The Deal, in order to actually be a deal, and not an aspiration, has to be backed up by government policy, and supported by the court system. These are the two pillars that gave rise to “qualified immunity.” If cops don’t have qualified immunity, then there is no Deal. There can be no deal if cops spend one day in the county jail, or even worse, “life in prison without the possibility of parole” for killing people…you know, like you and me.
Our Endless Wars:
George Floyd may very well have been murdered, not so much by the cop who kneeled on his neck until he was dead, as much as he was by America’s endless wars. This ‘rogue state’ situation in which America now finds itself began with the Reagan Administration and has continued, almost unabated, since then. It was during the Reagan years that the efforts by conservatives to de-fund education and over-fund our military machine began to occur in earnest.
Once the United States began to shift its international priorities from collective, diplomatic engagement, and leadership in multilateral organizations like the United Nations, to a unilateral and adventurist foreign policy based upon military might, the era of endless war became inevitable. How then, does this affect the murder of George Floyd? The age of endless wars murdered George Floyd through its creation of the militarized police force.
I believe that may be the most significant factor in his death. We have vast numbers of people coming out of combat-driven military service every day. These people need to find employment when they discharge back into society. These people, and all of us, would like to find employment in a field in which we feel comfortable. Your basic military veteran feels comfortable carrying a gun. There is only one profession in America, outside of the military, in which members carry guns, and that is the domestic police force. This is one of the major factors in the militarization of our domestic police forces.
The core problem here is training. Domestic police forces should enter any situation with the following thought process at the center of their training: “We have citizens here in a conflict, how can I best diffuse the tensions here, and serve the proposition of domestic tranquility, using arrest tactics only if absolutely necessary, and deadly force only as a last resort to save people’s lives.” When a philosophy like that is at the core of police training, peace will reign in your society. There will always be violence in any society, but a domestic police force that operates on the principles in the statement above will be a factor in minimizing incidents of violence.
Military forces are not trained that way. Military forces are trained, very simply, to identify and neutralize enemies. When you bring that philosophy into the realm of domestic policing, your society is in big trouble, because not only will the police see themselves as a separated cadre of former soldiers, but they will bring the philosophy of ‘identify and neutralize’ the enemies here to their policing practices. This is the core problem of the militarization of police forces. George Floyd was identified and neutralized.
What do we do?:
Let me start with this: We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all people are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator, by God, with certain unalienable rights that can never be taken from them by any person or people. That among these rights are life…yes, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, people create government, and these governments derive their just powers only from the consent of the people. Also, that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter, or completely sweep aside that government, and to form a new one; laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to secure their future safety and happiness.
The rebellion must not stop. The people have to realize that unless they press their knee down onto the neck of this government, no change will happen. The politicians will pay lip service to the plight of black Americans’ being subjected to state-sponsored terrorism at the hands of the police, just as they pay lip service to the thousands of people killed in this country by gun violence every year, but lip service is all it will be.
The majority of our politicians are members of the wealthy, shareholder class. Let me say this as an aside: just because you own a couple of stocks here and there, and play a little in the market, doesn’t make you a member of the shareholder class. The shareholder class is made up of the wealthy; the top 10%. The corporate CEO’s who, in the name of their money, have stolen our government. Therefore, we must understand, that unless we confront them and their police with ever increasing numbers and determination which they cannot match, nothing will happen.
This is what we must do. It is not easy, and the government will resist. They have had the American people on the defensive for too long. It is time to turn the tables on them and make them defend what they have done. We should take heart, though, because your average politician is a coward, and just a small amount of courage and discipline on our part, will take us a long way towards a “new government” in which the words of Thomas Jefferson paraphrased above can have true meaning.
Peace,
Niemand
