No one with an ounce of human feeling will ever get the image of that excremental excuse for a policeman, much less a human being, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes with his hand in his pocket.
It is therefore fitting that the cop who murdered Floyd, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with “depraved indifference to human life.” However that charge, which defines third degree murder under Minnesota law, is what his accomplices should be charged with, while Chauvin the chauvinist should at least be charged with second-degree murder.
America as a whole is guilty of depraved indifference to human life, as the most truthful op-ed the New York Times has ever published, “The Liberal World Order Was Built With Blood,” attests. Even so, nearly all pundits view the present chaos in the context of country rather than humanity.
In some kind of collective Jekyll and Hyde, peaceful protestors of the day during the pandemic turn into, or set up the vandals, firebombers, looters and zombies of the night. (How can the violence be the fault of ‘outside agitators’ when the entire country is engulfed in the violence of cops and criminals?)
The chaos in American cities was all too foreseeable, not in its particulars, but in its general outlines. As the tides of cumulative chaos wash in waves of grief over this land, people whose job it is to make some sense of the world have a responsibility not to default to easy narratives.
However MSM commentators, wrapping themselves in false humility, cannot refrain from canards such as, “the past, like the present, was contingent, and events that seem inevitable could have gone a different way.”
It’s either wishful thinking or arrogance camouflaging as modesty to say, “We simply do not know what comes next, nor can we predict the events that can move an entire nation from one path to the other.” We knew this was coming, and we know what is coming.
The idea that the future is entirely contingent on the present is as wrongheaded as the notion that the present is the inevitable result of the past.
Rather than unequivocally state that President Trump “can’t promise ‘law and order’ when disorder is happening on his watch,” we should be asking: Can Trump play the law and order card when chaos has been his means and meme?
Rather than declare that a president who has “built his political persona around discord and disruption can’t present himself as a steadfast authority,” we should be asking, can Trump “sell himself as an avatar of order and control?”
America has become the definition of godforsaken. That’s how a president who channels more evil than any other president in American history (even more than Trump’s favorite, the hater and slaughterer of Indians, Andrew Jackson), can stand in front of a boarded up church dating back to the nation’s beginning and wave a Bible in our faces.
It doesn’t take a prophet to see that Trump will not allow or accept defeat in the upcoming election. Even Joe Biden says he’ll pull something. “Lock her up” is likely to come back and bite the Donald in the ass, since he faces the real prospect of jail time once out of office.
Don’t look to the former ‘leader of the free world;’ America can lead in nothing now except chaos. Indeed, America has become the black hole in human consciousness.
An editor in New Zealand wrote, saying, “Many people here can’t stand Trump, but then there are others who are supportive.” Supportive of what, chaos and the destruction not only of the post-World War II order but humanity?
Trumpism, despite or because of its virulent nationalism and MAGA madness, has infected the entire world. Of course it is a virus as old as man—the tribal impulse, the ‘us vs. them’ emotionality.
To understand what is happening in America, one has to think outside the box of racism and police violence, indeed outside the box of this or any nation, and gain insight into the nature of order and chaos as it relates to human consciousness as a whole.
Astronomers are fond of saying that the universe evolved from chaos into order. But that’s simply not true. The universe evolved from lower levels of order into higher levels of order. Only man generates disorder and chaos, and that is the great conundrum, since we evolved in and from nature.
It boils down to the question of whether the order that imbues nature and the universe can begin to infuse man, the generator of disorder on earth.
Only an explosion of insight will suffice now. That is what will change the disastrous course of humankind. It can happen, but mass marches will never bring it about. We have to face and understand the Hyde side within us.
Martin LeFevvre
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