Truth lies in particulars

There are a lot of classifications of human beings getting tossed around in this situation; let's drill down to the level of the individual person

I thought a couple days of contemplating the layers of horror, sadness, confusion and fracturing that characterize spring 2020 in post-America would give me some level of clarity of perspective beyond that which I’d brought to my most recent reflections. I’m not so sure it has.

If I see the outlines of a theme, it’s that we absolutely must swear fealty to the exact recounting of everything that has been occurring.

In no particular order, I’ll offer my thoughts on the various aspects of what’s happening. Maybe clarity will come with the articulation of them.

There’s the question of how the unrest has morphed so far beyond what it originally was: a reaction to George Floyd’s murder.

There’s pretty clearly an Antifa presence - that is to say, snot-nosed young white people with chaos on their minds. The term “Antifa” lacks a hard and fast definition, however. During the Cold War, one could go to the founding documents of various Communist front groups, or guerrilla outfits in countries where proxy conflicts were occurring. There were records of their major meetings and plans. Not so with Antifa. I guess it’s a case of just being able to instinctively recognize it by, as I say, the snot-nosedness of those who smash windows and and burn cars, like knowing porn when you see it. There’s some video emerging of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters telling Antifa types to knock it off.

While that’s commendable, let us remember how Black Lives Matter came about. Its genesis was not exactly un-radical. The group was founded by three women, at least two of whom clearly had a preoccupation with identity politics in general, focused on “gender conformity” as well as racial matters. BLM was organized in response to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, which led to the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman. Now, Zimmerman, in his role as a watchman for his gated community, had a deserved reputation as an overly suspicious busybody, but it was well established at his trial that Martin was ramming Zimmerman’s head into the concrete as their confrontation reached its conclusion. The second cause that BLM took up was the Michael Brown shooing in Ferguson, Missouri, which was even more clear-cut. Officer Darren Wilson was responding to the report of a store robbery - found to be carried out by Brown - and found a young man - Brown - walking out into the street. He wanted to question Brown, but the first order of business was to ask Brown to step back up onto the grass. Brown charged Wilson, reached in his patrol car window, and tried to grab his gun. Wilson was found innocent by a grand jury, and by the Obama-era Justice Department led by a black attorney general.

That, of course, led to a couple of years of falsehood-based “hands up don’t shoot” posturing at sporting events.

But Black Lives Matter, it must be said, seems to be a responsible player in the current situation, at least relatively speaking. We shall see if that assessment remains reliable.

Now, I understand that this year’s Georgia shooting of Ahmaud Arbery is almost undoubtedly a case of vigilante murder, and that the Louisville shooting of Breonna Taylor, a clean-living EMT, was a blatant case of police misconduct. They used a battering ram, backed up by a no-knock warrant, because they had a report that her apartment was being used as a place for drug dealers to receive packages, which was certainly not the case. Compounded by what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd, the picture of a law-enforcement field in need of reform comes into sharp relief. Arrests of journalists, two black college students in an Atlanta situation in which they were dragged from their car and one tased, and even a black FBI agent in the ensuing unrest make that relief even sharper.

Theories about the players on the scene get even further out. George Soros is implicated from one direction and white nationalists from another.

Then there’s the comparative responses of various mayors and governors. The mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul - the epicenter of this entire phenomenon - as well as the Minnesota governor have been underwhelming in their responses.

On the other hand, Donald Trump’s way of conveying to them and others that it would be helpful for them to step up their games has been characteristically boneheaded, completely devoid of the kind of unity-fostering tone the nation desperately wants from a president at this time. In so doing, he lays himself open to portrayal as an all-hat-and-no-cattle phony, holed up as he is in the underground bunker with the outside lights turned off at the White House.

So maybe we’re not done having the “difficult conversations” that diversity circle and implicit-bias workshop purveyors have insisted we engage in for the last several years. But let’s be sure they’re conversations, and not lectures. If such conversations are necessary, can we agree on a common goal of regarding people as individual souls? Let us have the aim of defining respect as holding our fellow human beings accountable as particular creatures, and not for supposed transgressions based on some way they can be categorized.

Otherwise, factual accounts of what is happening in our world will never go unpolluted.