Something I Wrote During the George Floyd Riots

Since my wife died I have spent far too much time reading through old emails, mainly the ones I exchanged with her but also others, trying to recapture lost parts of my life. Last night I found this exchange with an old friend I wrote at the height of the George Floyd violence. The first one was called, "What I believe."

Me in 2020:

I believe that we are called on to be better. To rise above the world we live in.

I think that the world is full of awfulness, but that our task is to be good despite it all.

I think awful situation are traps that tempt us into anger and hate.

Violence seems to be a principle of the universe, and certainly of mammalian life. Sometimes we may have to be violent. But violence is the worst trap for our minds, the worst thing for our souls, so we should never indulge it if there is any way to avoid it.

The desire to do violence is a test. If we respond to provocation with violence, we have failed, and are spiritually lessened.

I also believe that this aligns with the politics of the situation. The last thing America needs now is more violence. If these demonstrations had been perfectly peaceful, we might have made real progress. Every act of violence moves us backward.

Yes, peaceful protesters have been killed. Hundreds of Gandhi's followers were killed, maybe thousands. Did he waver in his commitment to nonviolence?

He won. In every way.

My Friend:

I don't understands why you keep resorting to victim blaming, as if the violence done by police and provocateurs is something the peaceful protestors can help. . . .

Me:

You mistake me if you think I am blaming the protesters for the violence. Most of the protesters have behaved wonderfully. So far as I can tell, most of the violence has been committed by the police.

But the looters, black and white, and the anarchist punks role-playing the revolution have tainted what might have been a wonderful triumph of the spirit. My sons defend them, saying it is necessary to fight back, that without violence the status quo can't be changed. They have watched at least a hundred videos of kids smashing things and setting them on fire, cheering it on. I think the takeover of that police precinct in Minneapolis was the highlight of their year.

I think violence is the status quo, so violence only feeds it.

How is the world changed for the better? By violence? Very rarely.

I mean, I think the Civil War was justified and honor the Union men who fought it, but we are still paying a heavy price in division, anger, hate, and horrible politics, plus the men hardened by the war went west and turned what they had learned on the Indians.

Gandhi said, many times, that it is not possible to build a just world with violence. Every act of violence is a blow against the world we want to build.

Maybe I ask too much; maybe I want everyone on my side to be perfect. But I ask, why isn't the world better? The answer I come up with is, because we aren't better. To really build a just world would be an extraordinary achievement and to do so would require extraordinary things of us.

My sons and the anarchists they admire think that the world is bad because bad people are in charge and to fix it we just have to smash their power.

I think that unless we first mend our hearts, the new regime will turn out just like the old one.

I despair of America because I see millions people whose identities are based on hating other people, who think the solution is to defeat those they hate and lord it over them. But even if my side won, what kind of nation could we have based on 60% of the people holding all the power and heaping scorn on the other 40%?

The police beat people up because they are afraid and full of anger and hate. I suppose most people would blame them for giving in to their dark emotions; I blame fear, anger, and hate, and what I want is a politics built around soothing them and eventually eliminating them.

Hate the sin, love the sinner.

At a personal level, I mistrust anger. I do not believe that angry, shouting people can build anything, least of all a better world. I hate what anger does to me, and I don't much like what it does to anyone else, either.

Plus the politics is bad. So far it looks like more Americans blame the police for the violence than the protesters, for the first time ever. But if there had been no looting and no antifa punks setting things on fire, it could have been a triumph.

And this is my model of the world: it is unjust and violent because we can't manage to be good enough. We can't still our fear and our hate for long enough to work together to build what we want. So we are divided, and the clever and ruthless always end up in charge, using us to get their way.

Maybe we're not doing badly for smart baboons. Maybe only angels could really create the sort of world I want. But I don't have to be happy about it.  

Me in 2026

Now that we can see that the riots helped Donal Trump to a second term, with all that followed, I think the wisdom of my response is confirmed. Violence leads only to violence, hate to hate, in a spiral of doom. The only way out is compassion.