The video clip below popped up first thing this morning and it is a real kick to the gut. Federal police pepper spray this man just … just because they can. Not for anything he is doing or for anything he is saying, although that is a serious reality check. What values and principles America claims it stands for are often just cover for gratuitous violence against anyone standing in our way, whether in Vietnam or at home. Federal police cooperate by making his point for him.
A few days ago, the president of the Portland, Ore., branch of the NAACP complained that the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement has been lost in the ongoing confrontations with the acting president’s personal militia in Portland. This is no time for spectacle, writes E.D. Mondainé:
If we engage them now, we do so on their terms, where they have created the conditions for a war without rules, without accountability and without the protection of our Constitution. This makes me fearful for the safety of everyone demonstrating in Portland. That’s why we need to remember: What is happening in Portland is the fuse of a great, racist backlash that the Trump administration is baiting us to light.
We cannot fall for their deception. We cannot settle for spectacles that endanger us all. This is a moment for serious action — to once again take up the mantle of the civil rights era by summoning the same conviction and determination our forebears did. We welcome our white brothers and sisters in this struggle. In fact, we need them. But I must ask them to remain humbly attuned to the opportunity of this moment — and to reflect on whether any actions they take will truly help establish justice, or whether they are simply for show.
There are always those on the left on whom long-term strategy is lost. As far back as the 1960s, there were always lefty friends more interested in showing out or confrontation with “The Man” than in advancing the cause, whatever it was. They’ll be telling their grandchildren about the time they got shoved by a cop whether or not their protests or their shoving changed anything.
Point them to the example of John Lewis.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.