Turn off the lights

As our nation descends into chaos, the indelible image will be a shuttered White House with the president hidden deep underground in a bunker.  For those hip to recent horror movies, the scenes playing out on the streets of our nation's major cities look an awful lot like The Purge, only this time cops have been allowed to join in the action.  Not all, mind you, some policemen have shown their solidarity with the protesters, but unfortunately when night falls these peaceful demonstrations have turned into riots.

No one knows for sure quite what is going on.  Conservatives are convinced it is the notorious Antifa at work, but surveillance footage has shown that many of these vandals and looters are white and arrests have further shown that some of these "bad actors" are white supremacists who came to these cities hoping to stir up trouble. 

Meanwhile, Twitter has been closing down accounts set up by known white supremacist groups posing as Antifa, hoping to create further unrest on the social media.  This is oddly reminiscent of the tactics used by Russian hackers in the 2016 election, which tried to incite race riots by encouraging Black Lives Matter and White Supremacist rallies on the same street corners through phony social media advertising.  One of these conflicting rallies actually played out in Houston.  Fortunately, no harm came from it.

This hasn't stopped our bunker president from threatening to list Antifa as a terrorist organization, even though it hasn't been very active in recent years.  Still, it is a name that remains fresh in the mind of the people who voted for him in 2016, largely in response to all the protests taking place over similar shootings of black men by police.  They sided with the cops, staging counter Blue Lives Matter protests, as they claimed these young black men were thugs and deserved what they got.  A sentiment shared by Trump.

However, the death of George Floyd led to a lot of conflicting emotions.  A video painfully presented three cops kneeling on a black man for well over eight minutes.  One of them on his neck.  We heard Mr. Floyd's plaintive calls for help.  None came as one armed officer stood guard.  In the end, Mr. Floyd died.  It was so brutal that even Rush Limbaugh agreed that the cops had gone too far.  Still, it took several days before an arrest warrant was issued for Derek Chauvin, the man kneeling on Mr. Floyd's neck, but so far no warrants have been issued for the other ex-cops associated with this brutal murder.  All had been quickly fired by the Minneapolis Police Department at the Mayor's insistence.  This is important as the former police officers will have none of the usual judicial protection afforded them in such cases.

It was this delay in pressing charges that led to the protests.  The Minneapolis police reacted harshly to the demonstrators, spurring retaliatory strikes that quickly spiraled out of control.  A police station was burned to the ground, and soon the protests and riots spread to other cities, as just about every black community in America has experienced similar situations. 

The riots hit the streets of DC, which led to a panic at the White House with the president being scuttled to an underground bunker out of fear the demonstrators might actually breach the perimeter security fence, as Trump bemoaned the DC police was doing nothing to stop the protesters, and that he only had his security service and "vicious dogs" to protect him.  It seems the bunker has wi-fi.

While governors and mayors and police chiefs have urged calm across the country, the hunkered-down president has threatened to call in the military to clear the streets, citing an obscure act that has been rarely used since it was first written in 1807 out of fear of rebellion and insurrection from pro-British groups in America.  It seems our president wants a race war, hoping that it will get more white people to vote for him in November.  So far, no one is biting.

White supremacist groups may talk race war on their favorite blogs but so far they just like to parade around with assault rifles, terrorizing fast-food joints and shopping malls.  They don't seem anymore interested in armed conflict than does Antifa, what few there are left of this black militant organization that sprung up in 2016.  However, that doesn't stop others from trying to exploit these two groups, and the most obvious agitators are pro-Trump groups hoping to once again stir up racial anxieties in America.

These folks do not differentiate between protesters, arsonists and looters.  They are all one in the same in their addled minds.  It doesn't matter that they elected a president purely out of protest to what they believed to be the insufferable political correctness that had gripped the country in the form of minority, women and gay activist groups in 2016.  They turned Trump rallies into a bloodsport, calling out these "snowflakes" in the most derogatory terms imaginable, while they took similar epithets as a badge of honor.  For them, the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat, and that goes for protesters as well.

I would like to think we will get past all this bombastic rhetoric this election year.  How much more of it can any civil person take? 

The same goes with police brutality.  We saw how militarized these city police departments have become in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri riots in 2014.  They get all sorts of military safety equipment, armored cars and ordnance left over from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at greatly reduced costs thanks to Congress.  Even in a peaceful community like Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, where I grew up, you can see the Walton County police driving around in a massive armored vehicle.  What on earth for!

What police departments need is community awareness counseling not urban warfare training.  Minneapolis is not alone in terms of an adversarial relationship between the police and the city.  What made the recent images so striking is that Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers appeared to be mocking the NFL players who knelt for the national anthem in quiet protest to police brutality across the country.  It seems that George Floyd served as a stand-in for Colin Kaepernick, and they were humming the national anthem in their heads.  Trump was able to capitalize on this sentiment as well in 2016.

I understand that the police feel they live in a dangerous world and need to take precautions.  197 police officers were shot in the line of duty during 2019.  However, the police killed nearly 1100 persons last year and young black men made up a disproportionate share of that number, most of whom were unarmed.

This is the time for the President to step up, but instead he turned off the lights on the White House and went into hiding to avoid addressing the deep pain many in the black community feel when it comes to the excessive force used by police officers that patrol their neighborhoods.  He chose instead to lash out at imaginary left-wing extremists and evoke his "Law and Order" campaign promise, which served him so well in 2016.  He hopes to exploit the chaos, not bring calm to a deeply troubled nation.