27 August 2020
"We appreciate you being here."
Police officers offered water to and thanked disorganized militia for volunteering their own time, and guns and bullets and reactionary cowardice, to the cause of defending property in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Protests had been ongoing throughout the day. Two evenings earlier, Jacob Blake had been shot seven times in the back by a police officer, paralyzing him below the waist. Nearly his entire colon was removed along with part of his small intestine. His stomach had been passed through by bullets bought by taxpayers and sanctioned by the State.
He will live, but he will never be the same. In speaking with his mother in the hospital, Blake apologized. He did not shoot himself. A struggle with officers did take place, though as a lone man against three officers it requires advanced fallacious gymnastics to justify the outcome that he knew would permanently change lives beyond his own. This because of one brief moment that is just another in a list of brief moments, all too similar to be coincidental, which have brought this country to the brink of a reckoning with its ugly, racist past.
"I don't want to be a burden on anyone, I want to be with my children, and I don't think I'm going to walk again, Mom."
Jacob Blake remains in the hospital. He remains heavily-medicated, and as of this writing was not aware of the unrest going on in his community -- unrest in response to how his body was written off as lacking the inherent value it has by simply being alive and how it was savagely penetrated with seven hot pieces of lead.
A half of an hour's drive away, a 17 year old would join a Facebook group along with others in the area who were looking for a way to insert themselves, and their guns and their bullets and their reactionary cowardice, into the increasingly volatile situation. Some within this group had asked to be deputized, a request that was refused.
On video, this child can be seen answering questions. When the person behind the camera asked about their non-lethal ammunition, the teenager -- illegally carrying a long rifle in the open -- responded "we don't have non-lethal."
They came prepared to kill in defense of property, and he would do just that.
Twice.
After shooting a protester in the head, the militia role-playing had suddenly become real. Other protesters who saw the shooting at a gas station converged on the shooter, yelling out how he had shot someone.
He then shot two more people, killing one, before walking toward a police line. Members of SWAT were looking on as a young, white male stepped closer, still armed.
Cries from the crowd of how he had shot and killed people went ignored.
Calls from the police for the shooter to stop approaching them also went ignored, but no one was shot for this lack of compliance. He was allowed to leave and drive the 30 minutes back to his home before being arrested the next day.
In a matter of two days the country bore witness to what could not have been a more striking example of the deeply-rooted problems being protested in the first place. In the United States, black and brown men and women, boys and girls, feel like their own survival of an encounter with law enforcement is a flip of a coin, at best.
Yet we all saw a white person, a child really, disobey lawful orders from police, while armed with a rifle that he had used on at least three human beings, and not be shot even once. We saw as he was allowed to disappear into the night.
And therein is the contradiction that is the American Ideal met with the American Reality -- freedom and liberty for all who look or dress or speak a particular way, poverty and dehumanization for all others.
The United States has never lived up to the lofty promises made time and again of liberty and equality, but, as we have seen this summer, we will all be forced to look squarely at our own roles in allowing that contradiction to persist.
And it will hurt. But at least we will be able to stand up and walk again after.
