Random Thoughts At The Beginning Of A Revolution

A revolution?

Last month, my last post described the current situation as the beginning of a second civil war.  Like the first one, race forms the basic line of division, even if our history books lean on the more obvious geographic labels.  Like the first one, one side (the white side) boldly proclaims its willingness to use force, to the point of violence and physical harm, to defend its interests.  And there has been plenty of violence already, the vast majority of it against people of color, and not just over the past three years, nor the early decades of this still-young century, but for the entire history of this country almost from the moment white people first set foot on it.  Maybe terms like "first" and "second" are irrelevant.  Maybe we should just accept the fact that racial turmoil, instigated by whites against people of color, has been the one thread that runs throughout our entire history.

And maybe, just maybe, we're doing that now.

Why is this moment different?  A few observations.

In a very real sense, this moment has come about in an era in which corporations have disempowered the people, while technology has empowered them.  In the past four decades, as the profit motive has become exalted to an almost religious level in American corporate life, the corporations that own media outlets have focused on news that the privileged want to consume, and not the realities that all of us, rich or poor, need to face and address.  In the process, the line between journalism and entertainment blurred to the point at which electing a publicity hound dog like Donald Trump as president seemed not too much of a stretch.

So, who's practicing journalism nowadays?

Thanks to the Internet, it's all of us.

Without smartphones, and the power of the World Wide Web to share video files, we may never have known that George Floyd was murdered by police, dying for the sake of being African American in the U.S..

Without smartphones, we would not have known the extent to which people of color and progressives across the spectrum were being libeled by random white terrorists and their fellow-travelers in the Murdoch media, by attempting to forment violence that they subsequently blamed on the vast majority of protestors, who were (and are, even as I type) peacefully protesting the violence that has been formented for far too many centuries.  Interestingly, many of those terrorists, just a few weeks ago, were getting unearned coverage from the corporate media for carrying semi-automatic rifles on behalf of their right to not wear face masks in the midst of a pandemic.  For them, the boundary between threats and actual physical force may be no boundary at all.

I have posted many times here about what I have felt is the death of journalism in America or, at least, the death of corporate-sponsored journalism in America.  I have wondered whether the solution might be for major journalism outlets to re-cast themselves in the form of not-for-profits, a structure that would allow them to truly publish the news we need to have without fear or favor.  In fact, here in Baltimore, there is a movement afoot to do exactly that to our city's major metropolitan newspaper, the Baltimore Sun.  I take this opportunity to invite you to take a look at the website that operates on behalf of this idea, and consider doing what you can to support it.

But, maybe, as is so often the case, maybe it's not a case of either-or.  Maybe, in the digital age, each of us is a journalist  Each of us, any of us, could be in a position to record and share a story that has the potential to change our lives, perhaps even to change the world.  What has happened over the past two weeks has already shown the potential for what this can accomplish.  As a result, rather than facing an extension of our centuries-long racial civil war, we may be on the cusp of a second American Revolution.

Let's hope so.

This much is certain:  Trump, who fancies himself as the most central, the most all-powerful avatar of traditional political and cultural values, has been exposed as little more than a symptom of the pandemic that has cursed this nation from before its founding:  the virus of racism.  That virus has now been exposed to such a powerful extent that it has resulted in one real blessing:  it has created an environment in which Trump can only cower in fear in the White House, now surrounded by an extra layer of fencing.  The man who bragged about stopping immigration by building a wall across the southern border is now walled inside his own bunker.

And, extra fence or no extra fence, it is now painfully clear that he has no right to be there.

He has used the protests, with the aid and connivance of his replacement Roy Cohn, William Barr, to form a personal, private army to assault peaceful protests with armed assaults.  He even went so far as to use physical force against peaceful protesters--tear gas and rubber bullets--to stage a photo op in front of a church, where he held up a Bible he has probably never read.

If Trump has not crossed a line for you prior to the death of George Floyd, his behavior since that death cannot be seen as anything but an abdication of any intention to obey the law and serve the interests of all the nation's people.  He must go.  He must go now, if any meaningful standard of justice is used as a reference point.

But, since his party has become every bit as law-breaking and otherwise as craven as he is, it'll have to wait until November.  Then, perhaps, the next American Revolution can begin.