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]

Yah. There are a lot of things *like that* happening similarly in other places, as well, and I absolutely do not want one group's rage to be suborned by another's opportunism. But I don't know what to do about it. (Other than for people to protect each other as best they can.)