When we woke up this morning, the only ones who knew what had happened to Garrett Foster were those who were there. The rest of us only knew that he was shot and killed at a BLM protest. That he was a libertarian who sympathized and marched with BLM, likely due to the overlap of opposition to unchecked state power without adequate accountability for brutality by state agents. That he often attended protests while open carrying.
We saw conflicting reports with widely divergent details. In one version, he was shot while pushing his fiance's wheelchair across the street, possibly while shielding her from bullets. In another, he fired his AK at a car as the driver tried to run over a group of protesters, prompting the driver to shoot back. Or he fired in the air, or not at all. (The cops have since said his weapon hadn't been discharged during the incident). He kept his weapon aimed at the ground the entire time, or he pointed it at the man who shot him.
But that didn't stop far too many from immediately filling in the blanks how they chose to, making him a villain or a martyr or a symbol before the facts were even in. BLM, the left, and many libertarians wanted him as an innocent victim or courageous hero, particularly if the shooter turned out to be a person with a particular brand of politics. Many on the right, the ALMs, the MAGAs, wanted him to have a violent history, to have been a real threat, and to have been justly stopped by someone beyond reproach and conceal carrying in a pickup truck with a blue line bumper sticker.
And those who waited to fill in the blanks? Well, many still seemed to hope it all happened a specific way to and from specific types of people, painted simplistically.
When all that was known was that he was "with" BLM and shot dead, I saw people disgustingly saying that he literally deserved to die for "defending Marxists". Once there was more public info, it was easy enough for them to victim blame, slipping seamlessly into what mistakes were made or what portions could be cherry-picked to tell the story they wanted. On the other side, others ignored the reports that told a different tale. He may have raised his gun and pointed it at an innocent yet armed driver in a parked car or one that was moving too slowly to be trying to ram into the crowd... who may have been trying to defend himself from a valid, credible threat.
And both side's reactions, the stories they were convinced were the right readings, seemed to completely, conveniently mirror what their preexisting thoughts of the protests themselves actually were. Seems no matter what the final story is, far too many will merely focus on the bits that confirm their priors and disregard the rest, learning nothing.
I still don't definitively know all the relevant bits of what happened. We may never know for sure, and there may be nothing to learn from the incident rather than the reactions even if we do. But whatever happened, likely happened within a matter of seconds, not hours, in a tense situation. In no rational reading of the story am I happy that he is dead. There is no world in which his death is a cause for celebration. And for those who used it as a chance to, well... it'll be hard for me to regain respect if there was any there to begin with.
This is Garrett Foster, the activist who was gunned down in Austin TX tonight. Rest in power ✊🏾#AustinProtest #GarrettFoster pic.twitter.com/Netxg2XEdR
— Oskaer 🧬 🇸🇴 (@Oskaer__13) July 26, 2020