Longtime readers will know that I've often ushered in the start of a new month with a newsletter. June was no exception, but at this moment - May 31, 2020, at around 11PM - I've made the rare TOA decision to delay my planned post for at least a couple of days, and replace it with a fresher perspective.
It was a simple decision, really, because I've spent the past couple of hours sitting in front of the TV, just a few blocks from the chaos, hearing echoes outside my window of the sirens, explosions, and helicopters that are coming through on the news coverage. It's been a sickening night. I've seen people hit by cars, fires lit all over the Boston Common, and looters smash windows that once reflected my own sorry image back to me. It was a no-brainer to delay my planned post because I'm pretty sure whatever I set last week to go up today wouldn't make much sense if I posted it now.
I don't want to get into the routine of posting all my knee-jerk reactions to current events. Quite frankly, in the context of everything that goes on in the world, the range of topics where I hold a valid opinion is very narrow, and I would wander outside my borders very quickly. But I will go to bed shortly with a huge sense of disappointment, sadness, and grief about tonight's inevitability. My dread grew throughout the day. I woke up to the news reporting on another night in a long week of nationwide protests, outrage, and violence. I walked to Downtown Crossing this afternoon and was stunned to see that Macy's had boarded up its windows. On the way home, I watched protesters in large groups headed for Nubian Square, and sensed that I wanted no part of what might come tonight. On a walk just a few hours later, I was greeted by a massive police presence preparing near the Public Garden, and wondered for the millionth time why organizers think funneling a large group of shouting people into one concentrated area is a good idea. As I made my back home down Charles Street, it struck me that it was odd to see only Starbucks with its windows boarded, or that so many cars remained parked on Beacon Hill's streets.
I expect my frazzled feelings in this moment will give way over the coming week to a more familiar sensation, something that I've come to expect anytime these kinds of events are processed, analyzed, and explained to us in the aftermath. I can hear it already in the real-time commentary on these local news channels - the violence undermines the protests. I'm always in half-agreement with this common reaction. I understand the point that if everyone behaved like the average protester, there would never be a problem. But if every police officer behaved like the average police officer, there would never be a problem, either. It's hard for some to follow an example that has never been set.
The full story here seems to be that just as violence undermines the protest, so too does violence undermine the police. But we only ever seem to hear one side of that story, despite the long history of police brutality in this country. Each protest is against a system that prefers to excuse extreme events as exceptions; all that protesters want is for the system to accept responsibility for its failures, and stop these horrors from recurring again and again. All we want is equality. Until then, I'm afraid we'll have more nights like this, where each inexcusable force is met with an equal and opposite reaction, balancing an equation so that inequality will never change.
