The last three and half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone, or a best-selling novel by Sinclair Lewis. First the pandemic hit and hospitals were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and unemployment soared. Lines of cars stretched for miles at food banks and millions applied for unemployment. Heavily armed lockdown protesters demonstrated across the country: in Michigan, they forced the Capitol to close and legislators to cancel their session. Nationwide, over 120,000 people died of a disease no one knew anything about last year.
Then, once things started to reopen and businesses struggled to return to some semblance of normal, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed kneeling on the neck of a black man named George Floyd. As he died, he echoed the words of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of police officers in New York City helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd's death came only three days after three Georgia men were arrested on charges of pursuing and killing Ahmaud Arbery, (an unarmed black man) whom they saw running through his own neighborhood. Initially, a prosecutor declined to charge the men on the grounds that their actions were legal under self-defense laws.
In the aftermath, protesters poured onto the streets, first in Minneapolis, then nationwide, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country's gun-toting, anti-lockdown activists. Peaceful demonstrations turned into riots and the National Guard was called in to quiet the chaos.
For one brief shining moment in the midst of it all, it seemed as if the blithe brutality that sparked it all might check the worst impulses of the president and his Blue Lives Matter supporters. The authorities were forced to act: the ones involved in the case were fired, police chiefs nationwide condemned their actions and William Barr's Justice Department promised a federal investigation that would be a "top priority," even as Donald Trump, who has encouraged police brutality in the past - take his 2017 speech to a room filled with law enforcement officers as an example - described what happened as a "very, very bad thing."
The uprising in Minneapolis was reignited and furious people burned a police precinct. On Twitter, an addled Trump, who went into hiding in a bunker as fires were ignited around the White House, threatened military violence against those he called "THUGS," writing "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."
Whether Trump knew it or not, he was quoting a racist phrase used by George Wallace, among others, in the 1960s. The president later tried to tamp down outrage by saying he was just warning of danger - his campaign has hoped, after all, to peel off some black voters from the Democrats - but his meaning was obvious enough. This is the same president who tweeted out a video of a supporter saying "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat."
The Trump presidency has been marked by shocking spasms of violence: the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia; the massacre of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; the mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso. But, even as the country has simmered and seethed, there has not been widespread disorder. Now, though, we might be at the start of a long, hot summer of civil unrest.
So many things make America combustible right now: mass unemployment; a pandemic that has laid bare murderous health and economic inequalities; teenagers with little to do; police violence; right wingers itching for a second civil war; and a president eager to pour gasoline on every fire.
The demonstrations have taken place because of specific incidences of police violence, but also in the context of widespread health and economic devastation that has been disproportionately borne by people of color, especially those who are poor, whether Native Americans or blacks or Hispanics.
People have been unemployed, out of rent money, locked up, angry and frustrated. The frustration is likely to build, because the economic ruin from the pandemic is just beginning. In some states, moratoriums on evictions have ended, or will soon. The expanded unemployment benefits passed by Congress as part of the CARES Act run out at the end of July. State budgets have been ravaged and we will soon see painful cutbacks in public services.
But, if America feels like a tinderbox at the moment, it is just not because of pressure coming from the dispossessed.
Most American presidents, faced with such domestic instability, would seek de-escalation. This is one reason for civil unrest, for all the damage it can cause to communities where it breaks out, has often led to reform. Change has come when activists have created a situation where the people in power actually had to act in order to bring back some meaningful public peace.
Now, however, we have a president who does not care much about warding off chaos. In every other time when protest has reached a fever pitch because injustices very much needed to be remedied, the country ultimately tried to find a new equilibrium, tried to address it enough to reach some sort of peace. We now have a leadership that has been crystal clear that it is perfectly okay if we descend into utter civil war.
Some of the tropes are familiar, but we have not seen this movie before. No one knows how dark things could get, only that, in the Trump era, scenes that seem nightmarish one day come to look almost normal the next.
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