The Come-Back, Day 20. Hate Burns.

Here, we continue in Phase Two, with limited gatherings. If you look at the beaches, it seems like a regular summer's day. The heat is driving everyone to the seaside, and, though on the first days people were more circumspect, with the rising heat, precautions are forgotten.

Which leads to foci of new contagions. My husband complains that at the café where he stops every morning for a coffee, almost no one is wearing a mask. He stays away from them and wears his own, except for when he sips from his cup. We are definitely not out of the woods yet. 

Where they are jumping into the fire is in the United States. Apart from the mismanagement of the pandemic, now the usual monster of racism has again trundled through the cities.

Apparently, an African-American man, George Floyd, had paid for something at a convenience store with a twenty dollar counterfeit bill. The police were called, and they put him under arrest. They took him out of his car, and according to bystanders, many of whom were filming, even though he didn't offer any resistance, one of the police officers laid him on the ground and put his knee on George's neck. Despite pleas from the man, saying he couldn't breathe, and that his body was hurting, and the bystanders also asking the officer to take his knee off, the officer paid no attention. After long minutes, George didn't respond any more. When the ambulance finally showed up, he was dead.

There are so many wrong, wrong things here. If the man who had passed a counterfeit bill had been white, his word that he had no knowledge of the matter would have been taken as a doubt to his actual intent of fraud, and he probably would have been made to return what he had bought, and told to be more careful in the future about the money in his pocket. George Floyd was simply put under arrest without any explanations requested. 

If the officer had been arresting a white man, he would never have placed his knee on his neck while on the ground. The man was not resisting arrest. But, since he was a black man, it mattered less that the man receive a lesion. The officer in question, Derek Chauvin, had had eighteen complaints against him before, and was involved in three shootings. As a result of this killing, he, and the other three officers involved, were fired. But no charges were brought against them until yesterday, when Chauvin was charged with third degree murder. 

And the reason the charge was brought was probably due to the riots provoked by this latest killing. Because this was a deliberate killing due to contempt of a fellow human because of the color of his skin. Minneapolis, the city where this happened, is burning every night. Protests, some of which have devolved into riots, have swept across the country. 

Racism has always been there. Since the ending of slavery, African-Americans have always been treated as second class citizens. They have always had to serve their white masters, one way or another. From the time of Reconstruction, they have been relegated to inferior jobs, even in the cities, where poor whites had a bad time, and African-Americans have had an even worse time. All the faces in the old photos of people fighting for workers' rights at the end of the nineteenth, and beginning of the twentieth, are white. Not one black was recognized as fighting for an eight hour work day, nor for improved working conditions. 

Not until the Second World War, were blacks even allowed to work on the same factory floors as whites. Most unions wouldn't allow blacks to join, so African-Americans created their own unions. Not until the Civil Rights era were blacks treated more fairly in the workplace. 

I say more fairly, because, even now, there is discrimination, even if not overt. But that is probably the worst kind of discrimination. It begins in the cradle. If there is a group of children playing, black and white, if a window is broken by a stray ball, it's the black children who will be more closely questioned. A black child simply walking in a white neighborhood is motive for some people to call the police. Children have died for nothing, just for being black at the wrong place and time.

White parents tell their children not to get arrested because of the fear of their children having a juvenile record. Or, if the child is over eighteen, of having an arrest that might put off a future employer. No white parent, watching their child go out with friends on a Saturday night ever has to worry for their lives at the hands of the law. They teach their children that the police are there to punish those who break the law, and to help people.

Black parents have to explain to their children that they have to be cirumspect whenever they leave the house. They have to worry that, if a police officer talks to their child for whatever reason, that that officer might shoot their child, if they think they have a gun, instead of a phone, in their hands. Black parents can't give their children toy guns as a present, because a policeman might think they're real, and shoot to kill. Black parents worry every time their child leaves the house. They teach their children to be wary of the police, and to act as innocent as possible if they are ever stopped, holding out their hands from their bodies to prove they are not a threat. 

There are bad cops everywhere. We have our share of them. Petty people who feel big wearing a uniform and carrying a truncheon. There are at least three types of police. There's the radical, "make my day" type, who dares whoever he stops with provoking him, so as to rough him up before arresting him. Then there's the "good guy" type, who really doesn't want you to go against the law because that would mean a lot of paperwork for him. And the last is the "letter of the law." He follows the law to the letter, and is very businesslike and impersonal.

Unfortunately, a uniform gives the first type the impression that they can do no wrong and can carry out their own interpretation of the law. These people have always been attracted to law enforcement because it gives them power over others. These are the ones that have to be weeded out and thrown out. A police force is there to enforce the law with humanity, because we all make mistakes, some willingly, others without thinking.

The United States is not the Land of the Free. It never has been, except for a reduced group of people. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution were written for white landowners. African-Americans were not even considered people. There was just one Founding Father who was against it. Thomas Jefferson considered slavery a "moral depravity". He wrote bills to ban the import of slaves, and thought slavery would be a threat to the new nation. Yet, he owned slaves, and even thought blacks were inferior to whites. Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite. His hypocrisy continues in the present.

I weep for my childhood home.

Life continues.