No, I couldn’t sleep …
Much is being made of NBA player LeBron James tweeting:
FU*K THIS MAN!!!! WE DEMAND CHANGE. SICK OF IT
— LeBron James (@KingJames) August 26, 2020
More evocative, though, was NBA coach Doc Rivers weeping:
All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them [at the Republican National Convention] talking about fear. We’re the ones getting killed … shot … hung. … All you do is keep hearing about fear.
It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. It’s really so sad.
(Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2020)
As it happens, a scene played out on video amidst the melee in Kenosha on Tuesday night that reinforces LeBron’s frustration and Doc’s lamentation. Because we see police cars approaching where two people had just been shot and killed. And the first thing they had to have seen was a white guy running towards them – in “hands up, don’t shoot” fashion – but with a long rifle strapped over his shoulder and dangling before him.
Yet, one by one, each police car drives by as if he were just an old dude taking a midnight stroll with his walking stick in a gated community. I mean, the shooter was literally trying to get arrested and they were effectively telling him,
It’s okay bro, you’re white, you can go.
And so he did, forcing the police to put out an all-points bulletin (APB) and arrest him the next day – after that video went viral.
But here’s the rub, which incited LeBron’s frustration and evoked Doc’s lamentation:
- There isn’t a single Black person in America who does not have good reason to believe that, if this shooter were a Black man running towards those cops, they all would have stopped and opened fire, killing him dead on the spot. Hell, our only wonder is that the police did not stop and take him to the nearest Burger King, aping the way their blue-line brothers infamously treated Dylan Roof – the white supremacist they picked up after he murdered nine Black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.
That, in a nutshell, explains why Black kids so often run from the police. But it also explains why even rich and famous Black men fear – there but for the grace of God go a son, brother, friend … or I – every time a white cop kills an unarmed black man.
Do you get that, white America?
These recurring white-cop-shooting-black-men tragedies are alarm bells ringing for racial reconciliation and real criminal justice reform. And Joe Biden is not only the most prominent person ringing those bells, but the person most suited to answer them – if he’s elected president in November.
In other words, this is no time for the one-stepping bullsh*t Trump is heralding as his gift to Black America. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, his “First Step” towards reform isn’t doing a damn thing to curb police brutality or ease simmering racial tensions.
More to the point, if you think the answer is voting to re-elect Trump, you are gravely misguided. Because the only thing his law-and-order shtick will lead to is an America that looks like a hybrid of an oppressive police state (like the former Soviet Union) and one plagued by guerilla warfare (like so many countries in Latin America and Africa used to be).
The last thing this country needs is a wannabe strongman like Trump – who has more in common with tin-pot dictators of yore than any former US president. In fact, did you catch his lame attempt to one-up his BFF strongman, Vladimir Putin, with a staged entrance for that naturalization ceremony at the White House on Tuesday night? This was complete with Marines playing Kremlin guards by swinging open double doors for him to waddle in.
Not to mention the self-defeating idiocy inherent in this “I-alone-can-fix-it” misfit promising law and order if he’s re-elected. After all, he’s proving right now that he can’t deliver it. The term “gaslighting” does not do justice to the projection afoot.
Finally, apropos of guerilla warfare, America will descend into full-scale civil war before the rainbow coalition of Americans – who believe Black Lives Matter – allows Trump to turn it into a Soviet-style police state. To see how this might play out, it might be helpful to know that the white shooter referenced above is a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter and his victims are all white BLM supporters.
But, unlike Confederate leaders – whose monuments he so reveres, Trump will ensure his children emulate him and dodge being drafted if the civil war he’s stoking erupts. No, he and his kids will be safe in their gilded towers while you and yours are perishing in the American carnage of his making.
So think before you vote!
Related commentaries:
Jacob Blake… Dylan Roof… George Floyd thread… projection… Voting…