The Democratic National Convention ended with as little fanfare as a Microsoft Teams meeting where I work, or perhaps a Zoom session while you home school your child at the start of this Covid-19 school year that begins as last year ended.
Noticeably missing from any of the speeches has been any mention of rioting in the streets of any of the major cities I identified in my earlier post, or indeed civil discourse of any meaningful kind. There was, sadly, the family of the murdered George Floyd who were up for a brief moment of silence in memory of their loved one.
Sadder still is that the meaning behind his death appears to have been co-opted by others with agendas that, for them at least, had much more meaning than the death of this one poor soul at the hands of some out of control policemen.
And herein lies the real tragedy of whole thing.
When George Floyd was murdered, it shocked everyone. I've worked alongside law enforcement people in community corrections for 33 years, and I was stunned by the maliciousness and lack of humanity by the officers at the scene. I don't tolerate mean spirited talk in the staff I lead, much less any questionable behavior, and I can't understand it when something like this gets so out of hand. I tend to agree with many who say that when things like this happen, there is a culture that allows it.
But what happened after that by many parties is cruelty and viciousness on a scale that will get worse if not addressed quickly. Not only that but the civil authorities, including prosecutors, are often just letting destructive criminal behavior go with no consequences. This week, in New York City a retired policeman was engaged in a conversation with a homeless man, who then sucker-punched him, wrestled him to the ground, beat and kicked him some more before stealing his cell phone and head phones. As the retiree got to his knees, the man kicked him in the head again, rendering him unconscious.
The criminal was given a desk appearance ticket for this potentially murderous act. A desk ticket? I'm not from NYC or any place where violent felonies are dealt with in this way, but this is what leftism in large cities has come to most often, these days and I challenge you to prove me wrong. It's simply outrageous and will have consequences of its own on a larger scale once leaders like Bill DeBlasio are replaced. This crime is not to be confused with the knock-out kick to a man's head in Portland, Oregon. At least the perpetrator in that crime was arrested later. The victim was trying to defend a transgender person.
New York City, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles are all in the same boat.
Leftists in other cities have tried to wrest the reigns of local government away from a reasoned path toward a revolutionary one covered in Orwellian doublespeak, but the earmarks of what they are trying are well organized, well funded, forceful, and persistent in the cities where they have gotten a foothold.
One of the central issues that comes up often in the late hours at night when protesting has degenerated into rioting has to do with "reparations". What this term really means depends on who is using the word, and in what context and before what audience. It is something of a moving target.
It's interesting to me how this word has come to dominate the national conversation since the death of George Floyd and the unrest that has overtaken many of our largest cities here in America. More interesting is that words from the lexicon of advertising have taken hold. Words like "branding" have been applied and this is clearly meant as a campaign to gain a far greater permanence than might otherwise have been possible with rioting during the long, hot summer of the plague of Covid-19.
An article by an NPR writer entitled A Call For Reparations: How America Might Narrow the Racial Wealth Gap is an interview with the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The 1619 Project Nikole Hannah-Jones. In a later writing for Time Magazine she wrote What is Owed. This is a quote from that article:
Reparations, to me, is about repair. In the context specifically of Black Americans, reparations has to do with 250 years of chattel slavery, followed by another 100 years of legalized segregation or apartheid and racial terrorism, and how that impacted the economic well-being of Black Americans.
Here's where things become a real moving target for me: When one views all of the violence in the wee hours of the morning, after the peaceful protesting has subsided and the violence, and looting overtakes the darkness "reparations" takes on a new definition. For the record, I am opposed to both.
The visuals of rioting in many of the largest cities plays over and over in a loop. One can't distinguish one city from another. The cozy mid-sized city of Asheville, North Carolina thinks they have gotten ahead of the curve, perhaps, by giving their version of reparations to the black community in that city. It is already being mocked on programs like The Daily Show.
Rioters have defined the looting of huge amounts of goods and merchandise in Chicago and other cities as reparations. More recently in Seattle, a large group of marchers went through a suburban, gentrified neighborhood, they being both Black Lives Matter protesters and Antifa rioters, demanding that the occupants abandon their homes immediately for them to occupy as reparations for white privilege. In one of the news stories I saw, someone yelled at one of the occupants, "you work for Amazon, don't ya"?
The bottom line is this appears to be one of the most historic games of chicken in American history and we have gotten a roundhouse kick from the blindside, while on both of our knees as a country.
History again repeats itself as the BLM and Antifa models follow those of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Hutus of Rwanda. Land reform is a common theme in most of these forms of mass murder. It hasn't gotten to that point in the United States yet, but people would like for us to believe that it is inevitable. That's the Marxist way: Class warfare is always inevitable.
Mao Zedong is a good starting point for the kind of reparations that seem to parallel our times:
The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule...it was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society.
This class warfare continues today. It's easy to separate those who are different and outnumbered. The cadres of communists that would organize in the towns and farms throughout China before, during and after their revolution would often bury the landlords alive, when they didn't have weapons to kill them immediately some other way. The first 3 years alone saw some 5 million landlords or wealthy peasants killed. Christians and Uyghurs, Chinese Muslims, are the People's Republic latest targets. Revolutions require a class to be reviled.
On the other hand, Stalin said: "The death of one is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic."
The Democratic National Convention went out of their way to feature the stars of their future this past week, while fleeing from what is really happening in the streets of America. Joe Biden can't do anything about the violence in the streets, and neither can Kamala Harris. No political party can and they know it. That's why they dodged the issue.
Trump is up next. We'll see what he's got. Politics is weird that way. But weapons win revolutions, as history often proves.
