by DON ROJAS
Today America is at a crossroads, a turning point…at an intersection of the old imperial order at home and abroad with the birthing of a new order, “a new normal” if you will.
For millions of people in America, the unprecedented street uprisings of the past 10 days offer a glimmer of hope that after 350 years of oppression, meaningful change may actually be on the horizon. Will America finally start to lift its knee off the necks of Black and Brown people? Time will tell, but one thing is certain: the brutal murder of George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis will be recorded by historians as the spark of a mass movement the likes of which have not been seen in modern America.
A “perfect storm” is sweeping through hundreds of cities and towns across all 50 states: a ravaging pandemic, utterly mismanaged by a racist, criminally corrupt and inept administration whose inaction has resulted in the deaths of over 105,000 Americans, 40 % of whom are Black and Brown people, led to tens of millions of unemployed, again with a disproportionate number of Black and Brown people, and to hundreds of thousands being fed by over-stretched food banks all across the nation and capped off by tens of thousands of protestors in the streets of America every day—all converging in the unforgettable Spring of 2020.
Meanwhile, Trump, the pathological narcissist and rage-tweeting little man in the White House becomes more desperate as he confronts a growing uprising in the streets. The “Law and Order President” resorts to the use of state terror as he moves closer to take authoritarian and neo-fascist measures against innocent people exercising their constitutional rights.
We are witnessing a convergence of powerful historical forces and the emergence of visible contradictions in the neoliberal order. The Empire is rotting at its core, and the cancer of violent White Supremacy is eating out the soul of America.
This is, indeed, a watershed moment. We are in the midst of not just another “movement moment” that comes around every two generations or so but one that has the potential to grow into a disciplined, organized mass movement militating for sweeping social and economic transformation.
For the most part, these uprisings started off as spontaneous outpourings, but as they continue to grow we are witnessing the young Black Lives Matter activists becoming the engine and the compass of the uprisings as they morph and evolve from an anti-racist police protest into an anti-systemic racism protest movement.
Hopefully, the protestors will come to a recognition that this deeply sick capitalist system cannot reform itself and thus has to be radically transformed into a functional political and economic democracy that expresses the will of the people and provides the material needs of the working people and the poor.
Playing a key role in documenting this rebellion is the mainstream corporate media narrative and its penchant for sensationalism, for focusing on scenes of confrontation, of looting, of police aggression and yet with too few interviews with the protestors themselves, too little analysis by the various “talking heads” about the underlying structural causes of the rebellion. Corporate media’s emphasis is always on the supremacy of property rights over human rights or on giving the opinions of public policy makers more merit than the views and motivations of the protestors themselves.
We have seen poignant images of white cops “taking a knee”, of protestors embracing and high-fiving with the national guard…..white police chiefs marching hand-in-hand with protestors. One particularly striking image was of a young white woman, nor more than 18, standing defiantly in the faces of the heavily armed police barrier and holding a sign that said simply, “White Silence is Complicit.” These scenes bring hope and optimism to our hearts.
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