Dolores Van Rensalier
For eight minutes, 53 seconds in May, despite a crowd desperately yelling and pleading, “he can’t breathe”, a white policeman in broad daylight continued to kneel on non-violent black man, George Floyd’s neck until he was dead. What followed was a burst of tens of thousands of national multi-racial crowds demonstrating their frustration and rage across the nation. Our country is in an enraged eruption.
The four Policemen involved were immediately fired. But not until Friday, May 29th did officials arrest the kneeling policeman, Chauvin, on third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. But so far, the three other policemen are still not arrested.
Like in our own La Mesa, CA, tens of thousands attempted to peacefully demonstrate across the nation with heart felt frustration, anger and rage. Police, who throughout black civil rights history had been merciless with demonstrator retaliation, for the first time followed orders to control their responses. No mistake, there had been a live videoed, horrific death the whole nation witnessed. This time when demonstrators around the country began getting out of control, police fired tear gas and only shot rubber bullets.
After three-days of demonstrations, officials across the country after investigating, warned peaceful demonstrators that 80% of those demonstrating were out of state organized anarchists that had infiltrated their demonstrations. These out of state demonstrators had been leading large crowds to violently burn down and destroy their own communities. National officials further warned peaceful demonstrators in no uncertain terms to go home before the 8:00 pm curfew time. Only then could police and the National Guard appropriately identify and deal with anarchist demonstrators. Minnesota State Senator, Patricia Torres Ray stated she realized right away that many violent demonstrators were from out of state. She was an experienced community organizer long before she had become a State Senator.
But thousands of among the nation’s uproar are by black people who will not take anymore. They cannot trust the very policing institutions that have long-violated their trust. These institutions have long-standing injustice within their own ranks. Black people rightfully feel they are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims like George Floyd:
Black people united across the nation, must focus on accountability to the specific goal of protection and equal rights under the law. To be profoundly effective nationally, we must rise above our long-range frustration and rage for our goal. Only black, intelligent “Unity” can effectively achieve specific listed equal rights throughout the nation.
This is what our demonstrations should be about. We must never forget the bottom line of our goal. We must not allow anarchist Americans to keep the divided chaos going. We must keep a clear focus on the goal, and weed out by vote out of position, those black or white who are not effective. We must keep replacing racism with our demanded specific solutions across the nation:
- We must nationally organize and list our specific grievances AND specific solutions to
each grievance. - We must locally organize and list our specific grievances AND specific solutions.
- We must have non-violent, peaceful demonstrations to clearly show the nation it is not us, it is organized anarchy, and/or police brutality.
- We must keep national TV and Newspaper journalists report our goal’s progress, or
report those who block it. On-going publicity is important.
Without keeping our ‘united’ activities focused, systemic racism will continue to divide us and prevail, and black lives will continue to not matter.
