Property and...

[pegkerr]

I keep thinking about Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which he said:

”...Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

I’m grieving about the property damage, yes—-the terrible loss of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery bookstore particularly hurts—but people are more important than property, and the protests over the death of George Floyd are righteous. Justice for George Floyd trumps everything. Echoing Lincoln: could it be that all the burnt buildings, all the destroyed buildings are divine justice, a mere drop in the bucket of expiation for the robbing of black Americans of their economic justice? The stolen wages of slavery and sharecropping, the redlining and higher mortgage rates for would be black homeowners? The denial of GI penefits, jobs and pensions?

A comment on Twitter last night: don’t expect people who are shut out of the benefits of the social contract to adhere to it.

(I’m still glad that the neighborhood watch saved the Nokomis Library last night from the knuckleheads who tried to burn it down.)

Edited to add: And I wholeheartedly append to this post naomikritzer's comments below.

Comments

[julian]

It's more than just the one guy, though. His co-workers who stood around and/or helped have been fired, but they haven't been charged with anything as of yet.

That's a detail, though.

Overall, there's a lot of voices inside this movement. A lot of them are new.

I don't know what their ultimate goal is. It may be they don't, currently, have one, other than to say the current system is not on their side. (Which it is not.)

And they may be saying, at heart, that it needs changing, in massive, sweeping ways.

I have, frankly, been wary of folks saying we need to upset the apple cart-- there's been a lot of them, from both sides of the aisle. I've always felt that it would lead to reactionary responses. But this may be happening at the moment anyway, and we may need to buckle in and ride it out.

Personally, I'm more in favor of things like what this guy talks about-- changes in how we do policing, and changes in how we fund it. https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655701271732224

But I don't know how that will happen.