Worcester Protests–Photos and Videos
“We don’t want no peace. We want equal rights and justice.”
Peter Tosh
The Trump presidency is a black comedy.
His extreme distortions of reality, like claiming he is the “law and order president,” always makes for a good laugh.
Black people, of course, are not laughing. They are marching in the street, choosing potential death by the coronavirus over certain death by racism.
They know that a hard truth lies beneath the president’s buffoonery.
Donald Trump betrayed our national security and compromised our elections, perhaps the two greatest crimes you can commit against our democracy. Yet, the law and order Republican Party, from top to bottom, gave him a pass.
Black people know that George Floyd, a black man accused of allegedly buying cigarettes with counterfeit cash, was given no such quarter by four police officers.
Those officers executed the unarmed Mr. Floyd on the same day of his alleged crime, in broad daylight and the presence of witnesses.
They handcuffed him, placed him in a prostrated position and applied their body weight against his torso, legs and neck.
The officer with his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck kept it there for 8-minute, 46 seconds.
And he kept it there even after Mr. Floyd became unconscious, and for a minute more after paramedics arrived on the scene.
Figuratively, it was a lynching.
A video of the brutal act ran like a time-lapse of the country’s 400 hundred years maltreatment of its black citizens.
And It showed unequivocally that this inhumanity is still the black man’s lot, despite the progress we say we have made as a nation.
And over those 400 years, black people have come to know that law and order is the yoke around their necks and the whip across their backs.
They know that every time they cry out for justice, as they are doing now in protesting the callous murder of Mr. Floyd, the powers that be pull hard on that yoke and crack that whip viciously.
Yet, there seems to be something different this time around.
It was predictable that Mr. Floyd’s murder by the police would unleash a nationwide wave of demonstrations; that interlopers with their agendas would hijack those demonstrations, and that calls for law and order would drown out pleas for equal rights and justice.
But I’m not sure if you could have predicted the following:
- That so many white Americans would be standing and marching in the streets, shoulder to shoulder with black people.
- That mainstream media, with the exception of the Trump Broadcasting Network, aka, Fox News, would stay on the injustice message of the protestors.
- That so many police officials would kneel with protesters in support of criminal justice reforms.
- That so many political and business leaders would publicly affirm, as many are doing now, the country’s legacy of discrimination and racism and pledge to help eliminate the scourge.
- That the esteemed Marine General James Mattis, who has been reticent in criticizing Mr. Trump’s policies, would break his silence on the president’s dangerous behavior.
But after watching federal law enforcement personnel Monday using tear gas, batons, horses, rubber bullets and a Black Hawk helicopter to menace and scatter peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C., General Mattis felt compelled to speak out.
“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he said.
“Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
These comforting developments might well be the only good to come from the Trump’s presidency.
Clearly, his unchecked lawlessness makes it impossible to deny and more difficult to ignore injustices long tolerated in our democracy.
More importantly, Trump’s tenure affirms why ignoring injustice against others invites it to your door.
Indeed, one could argue Trump has done more than any civil rights or political leader to help Americans realize that the yoke around the black man’s neck also encircles the neck of the Republic.