Rant #2,419: What's Going On

No, my family and I do not have the coronavirus, thank goodness.

All of our test results came back negative this weekend, so we are healthy and ready to go.

What is not healthy and ready to go appears to be our society, which is not only being torn apart by this disease, but it is once again being torn apart by racial insanity.

The death of George Floyd has sparked massive protests and massive attacks on our police force and on businesses where the protests are happening.

From New York to Los Angeles, peaceful protests are being turned into cop- and business lynches, and some people are forgetting that the protests are about how Floyd was treated by a rogue cop, and not about plundering and pilfering and destroying people and storefronts.

Based on the video that we have all seen, and other audio that has surfaced, this rogue cop did something indescribable, something so heinous that we, as a society, have become outraged.

Whether it was racially motivated, or simply a rogue cop, a bad cop, a cop that was an insult to his brothers and sisters in the force, versus a common criminal, remains to be seen, but some have taken this as another notch in the supposed long history of cops taking advantage of African Americans when enforcing the law.

I am sure this cop will get his due, but what I am not sure about is why every confrontation between whites and blacks is based on race.

Couldn't this episode simply have been a terrible cop doing an incomprehensible thing to another person, rather than a WHITE cop murdering a BLACK felon? Why does it always have to be racially motivated?

Beyond that, thousands of Americans--and people in other countries, who should stick to their own problems in their own countries--have stood together against what happened in Minneapolis, and I, personally, have no problem with that.

Americans have the absolute right to protest, and such gatherings are taking place across out land.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.

But the byproduct of these protests is that many of them have morphed from non-violent showing of outrage to absolute anarchistic meetings producing terror, with cops being attacked by rocks, bottles and explosives, innocent people attacked, and stores and businesses in the surrounding areas destroyed.

This has nothing to do with the death of Floyd at all. This has to do with people seeing their chance to pillage and destroy, and simply acting out their aggressions.

One of the most telling images I have seen--beyond the horror of seeing the video where Floyd was pinned to the ground and died--was a shop owner in Minneapolis cowering in his store while looters destroyed it.

The owner was a former firefighter who pooled his life savings into a sports bar, and in a flash, the bar was destroyed by looters who were there not to memorialize Floyd, but to cause nothing but havoc.

A reporter was interviewing the shop owner in his bar, and while being interviewed, the camera veered over to looters trying to drag the store's safe out the door, amidst fire, smoke and total destruction.

The owner was the same skin color as those destroying his store. The owner has no insurance on the store, so it stands today as rubble, never to be rebuilt again.

What does all of this have to do with the memory of Floyd?

Our leaders are telling us that the destruction is solely being caused by outsiders, many from radical groups such as Antifa, an anarchic, anti-Semitic group of rebellious brats whose only known cause is taking advantage of such situations to spread their scourge.

Well, I personally don't believe it is simply outsiders. Once these mobs infest the crowd, the crowd becomes a mob, and the mob creates havoc.

And once I see any signs highlighting Black Lives Matter, a similar anarchic organization, I know that outsiders might light the flame, but many of those in the community are pouring gasoline on that flame.

People have every right to be angry, but their anger cannot carry over to destroying innocent businesses and people who believe in these communities enough to do business in them.

And the violence against the police has also been mob-like, it has been heinous, and it is totally uncalled for.

Police organizations and unions have come out en masse to decry what one of their own did to Floyd, yet there are some who believe that it is now payback time, and any cop is their enemy.

They have not only been pelted by words, but by bottles, bricks and explosives. Police cars have been set on fire, police cars have not been given the right of way when trying to proceed, and police have had to run for their lives as some people have tried to murder them with explosives being thrown at them.

And where are our leaders in all of this? As usual, late to the table.

Sure, they have all decried what happened to Floyd, they have all said that violence is not the way to solve this latest situation, but it took them long enough to say these things that their voices are falling on deaf ears.

You would think that the most violent of the rioters--they are not protestors, they are rioters--might listen to leaders of the black community, such as the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and former President Barack Obama if they said anything about what was happening, but other than the voices of local black leaders, I have not heard one peep out of these national leaders about what is happening.

Their silence is deafening, but their silence also speaks volumes.

We will never, and I do mean never, be on the same page if we resort to violence and destruction during these types of horrid situations.

And people justify the violence, which makes it even more heinous.

The violence is not remembering the victim, the violence serves as an attack on our way of life.

When a violent protestor carries out a large screen TV he has just pilfered from the local Target department store that has been destroyed, how is that remembering what happened to the victim? How is that honoring his loss of life?

What is happening to our country?

We are all Americans. We are Americans first. I cannot stand that we are labeled as African Americans, Asian Americans, White Americans.

When I fill out a form, it always asks me for my ethnicity and my racial background. When I can, I simply don't answer. I am an American, and an American first.

Such unnecessary procedures serve to divide us further, and you just know that that is exactly what factions desire when they ask such questions.

And until we get on the same page about that, we are going to continue to be a land divided by people who want to destroy it, all in the name of the dead.

I see the videos, the unfortunate one showing the death of the victim, and I then see the unfortunate one of the former firefighter who poured his life savings into a store that will never rise again.

How sad, how very sad, how very, very sad.

"Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand-up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive. History has proven time and again that non-violent, peaceful protest is the way to achieve the justice and equality that we all deserve." 

                                                                       --Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)