A Question of Proportion: I’m a “Piece of S*!T”
This should never happen.
“When the looting starts the shooting starts” our 45th president tweeted in the aftermath of the Minneapolis protests against the police killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day. Let’s forget for a moment all of the events that lead to that statement and just unpack it a bit. When disorganized groups of people destroy property and take objects that don’t belong to them, the appropriate response is shooting them. Does this by itself seem fair, reasonable or proportional?
I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed the other night when I saw that a friend of mine had posted video footage of a Target store in Minneapolis being looted. Her caption: “This is absolutely disgusting.” Underneath, another person wrote “How is this justice? Nothing makes this ok.” I think of myself as a thoughtful person and an empathetic one. I like Target, I have had some wonderful times in their deli section and yet I am not “disgusted” by this footage. It is hard for me to conjure up outrage over it. I don’t like it. I feel uncomfortable with sudden outbursts of uncontrollable destruction. I don’t hate the owners of department stores but I also do not have that much attachment to concrete and plastic, not enough anyway to feel genuine pangs of disgust. On the other hand, I look at that photo of Derek Chauvin with his knee crushing George Floyd’s neck and “disgust” doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel.
I like to, whenever possible, reduce things to their simplest and most basic elements, if only because it helps me to make sense of more complicated structures. So with that in mind I ask, when is it ever appropriate to bear down on a person’s neck while their hands are bound behind their back? With as much empathy and understanding as I can muster for a police officer the answer I come up with again and again is never. Again, never! What was Chauvin afraid of? What police training could he possibly have been summoning to muscle memory in this scenario? Let’s say for the sake of argument that Floyd was resisting in the worst way possible, wriggling and kicking about, gnashing his teeth or even springing to his feet and running away down the street with his hands still behind his back. What threat could he possibly have presented to the public to make it necessary to subdue him with such force that he died choking out the words: “I can’t breath”? Speaking again about proportion let us not forget the charge against Mr. Floyd - forgery. He allegedly passed a phony $20 bill to a clerk in exchange for some cigarettes. Just think of this for a moment, in exchange for a crumpled piece of paper bearing the smeared image of a racist president a man had to die, just to have the current president threaten to shoot people for breaking and entering and theft.
On that same friend’s Facebook post another wrote “Wow.. a free pass to be a piece of shit human” in reference to the looters. If being a piece of shit human is to react strongly and emotionally to collective injustices in one’s community and one’s nation then I would be happy to consider myself a piece of shit human. Two wrongs do not make a right and yes non-violent protest is most often morally the better way to go. But what does our society expect to happen? What reaction is appropriate when we see the violence being committed against minorities so explicitly and justice all too often not being done to hold those in power accountable? We need understanding and empathy for the protesters. We need to know why they are acting the way they are acting. We can do this without condoning but must we condemn out of pocket? We are all cooped up from COVID quarantine, millions have lost their jobs because of it. We all see the same news and we all know what’s happening but our reactions are all out of proportion. People are suffering. Some more than others. Is it so disgusting that some of us are reacting violently against violence being perpetrated in our communities?
To bookend President Trump’s provocative call to shoot looters perhaps there is an even better quote. This quote, to me, is the defining statement of the 2020’s. This is the quote that should be a rallying cry for everyone who is sick of the lack of justice, the violence against minorities, the favoring of large corporations’ bottom lines over those of average working people when it comes to handing out relief during a pandemic. The quote is from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota referring to the rioters: “...there are simply more of them than us.” Damn right there are.
