George Floyd

In the wake of 2021, my European friends have become, oddly enough, the Ugly Americans. As an American, there’s nothing more entertaining than Internet strangers telling me what’s wrong with my country. Meanwhile, the queen mourns the loss of her own cousin.

Usually, I’m not bothered by it — I don’t tell them how insane Eurovision is, because they’re all aware. I do feel somewhat slighted when that casual assumption of basic knowledge isn’t reciprocated — in this case, the conviction of a single killer kop in the greater Minneapolis area is as ultimately meaningless as a French nihilist’s Gauloises.

I don’t think there’s anyone except Hubert Rip (45th Big Boy President) who genuinely believes that a corrupt system being mulishly forced to sacrifice one of their more cannibalistic representatives is going to solve America’s lethally-prejudicial systems. It’s just one craven, murderous cop, after all. Hell, we don’t even know if Chauvin conviction will even signal any real police reform in Minnesota.

We don’t know, and the sinister forces that allowed Chauvin to think he’d kill an unarmed black man with impunity are still very much at play. We’ll see them on full display in the coming months at the trials of the utterly loathesome Kyle Rittenhouse, at the trials of the cops who stood by and/or abetted Chauvin in carrying out his murder, in the trial of Kim Potter. They may well go free, we don’t honestly know.

But, from a minority viewpoint (a minority with passing privilege, but I still got to literally watch the Senate vote on whether I would continue to receive life-saving medical care back in 2017), here’s the importance of the Chauvin Trial outcome: Since His Odiousness trundled onto that podium in 2017, we’ve collectively been gaslighted. I don’t know if the last four years have been particularly any better or worse for minorities than at any point in time, or, if I just now feel the boot-heel a little more whenever I refill my prescriptions, or if, in the era of the ubiquitous photorecording device, all the horror stories about the system are on better display, but, for some reason, it felt like the last four years were a spectacularly dangerous time to be a minority. Any minority — when COVID first ravaged nursing homes and ICUs, we learned how much Americans don’t care about the elderly. When lynchings occurred after Robert the Goose’s odious, unwanted visits to American cities, we learned about how much white Americans hate black and brown Americans.

Again, all of this sentiment is fairly obvious — anyone with two eyes, the sense God gave gravel, and access to a news source aside from Fox News can tell you that America has a problem with violence, racism, and sectarianism. The truly evil, craven act of Delbert Frimpt was to tell us all, collectively, that what we saw and felt wasn’t accurate. Upset because the administrators at MiMaw’s retirement home didn’t follow proper PPE procedures last June and now she’s dead? Not to worry, the vaccine is just around the corner. Angry because your boyfriend Gustavo was stopped by the cops for a casual stop-and-frisk that escalated, and he lost his job due to tardiness because some racist cop felt safe detaining and threatening him? Gustavo sounds like he could be an illegal; he probably had it coming. The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh was a direct slap in the face of every sexual assault survivor (who comprise something like 20–25% of the population). We’ve had systems of oppression in place for centuries, we’ve had brutal, corrupt, incompetent leadership; what Rupert Taint did was encourage those systems to their logical extreme, and then tell the victims it was either our fault, or the oppression wasn’t that bad. I‘m not going to argue about who got it worse (we’re not going to play that classic Midwestern family competition, “Who got the breaks”), but everyone who was not a wealthy, able-bodied, heteronormative male suffered to some degree under the last administration. We couldn’t breathe. And we were told at every step, no, we could actually breath, look, we were struggling; that requires oxygen! I can’t claim to fully understand the struggles my BIPOC and LGBT+ friends go through, but, speaking for myself, I get an unending litany of, “You can’t really be that sick, you can walk and talk,” and, “Do you really need so much medicine and/or scans?” even from well-meaning people. I can’t imagine how awful racial minorities have it, because the subtext of all of this gaslighting is — to my ableist dog-whistle-trained ears — “Lebensunwertes Leben.” Go ahead and Google that phrase before telling me my white skin would protect me from fascist-adjacent stooges. When the subtext of the horrifying statements directed at me is, “Have you maybe considered giving up and dying?” I can not fathom the vitriole leveled at black women.

So, to have an attorney stand up and become the sorely-needed, Grown Up in the Room and say, “What you saw on camera? That happened, there’s no context that improves it. The horror and disgust you felt at seeing an authority figure strangle a man — the shame at seeing a black man literally with a boot to his neck — that is all real and it is valid.” And my country has a truly shameful history of refusing to convict clearly-guilty cops (I’m usually all for the benefit of the doubt, but it seems pretty obvious to me when there’s an unedited video of a person actually killing another human being in a public space)(and the Rodney King trial reveals that being caught , so no one knew if the right thing would happen. To have a dozen of us agree with the prosecutor on the record — that perception may be subjective, but there is an objective reality, and Derek Chauvin’s actions were on camera, inexcusable, and worth a few years in the slammer — that was a powerful moment. That was a genuine affirmation to every minority in America that our observations and experiences with the vicious core of the American dream are legitimate, and there are some lines in the sand that we do not cross.

Again, because so many prejudices are interwoven and built into the design of this country; I do not know if we will see any genuine movement at the necessary reforms even in my own life, even though I’m operating at a reduced life expectancy. I don’t know if we will see a federal commission on the use of lethal force in America, or a federal ban on high-capacity magazines, or increased investment in the health infrastructure, or any of the dozens of other badly-needed changes this country needs, but the Chauvin conviction felt like a cathartic, “Hey, we see you all” moment to all of us in the shadows of this country.

For those of you who watched that terrible video and didn’t feel horrified or disgusted, I don’t know how I can tell you that human life should matter, and lethal actions — even if justified at the time — must have some sort of consequences. These are conclusions you have to arrive at, independently. I will, however, ask you, if you had to face a criminal charge, would you rather have the public defender at your side, or a high-profile, expensive, private criminal attorney (I’d use Johnnie Cochran as an example, but he’s dead and unlikely to accept new clients)? The fact that you know which one is better is a strong suggestion that, on some level, you’re aware of the disparities and discrepancies inherent in this country. And, let me educate you on another grim little secret our corporate owners don’t want you to know: You won’t be a majority member forever. Even Jeff Bezos will age and become infirm, weak, and sick — this is how time and biology work. If you don’t want to arrive at old age with your only long-term options being, “Immortan Joe offers a swift death,” or, “flee to a better country,” you need to work to improve the conditions of every minority here. If every American has access to adequate medical care, voting, education, and housing, that means you do, too. We’ve reached an impasse in society where either everyone heals and reforms together, or we enter the Thunderdome together. The Chauvin verdict felt a little bit like America said, “Can we just talk for five minutes about the non-Thunderdome options?” It’s not going to fix anything, in and of itself, and Derek Chauvin is just one rotten apple (pro-police folks don’t want to use that idiom, because the entirety of it is, “One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch,”). And we’re not talking about the significant police reform and oversight we’ll need, but, somewhere in Minnesota, some innocent man, woman, or child, will get a few more years on this planet because twelve people did the right thing and put Chauvin away for a few years. And we weren’t all subjected to the bizarre national gas-lighting that seems to have been the overwhelming theme of the last few years. And that’s worth celebrating.