I just had a conversation with a woman that struck me as good, kind, virtuous, and loving. Her husband's a police officer, and in the process of this conversation she made it clear that not only did she believe that police officers should be held to lower standards than the rest of us, it had simply never crossed her mind that anyone could believe it should be any other way.
After turning that discussion over in my mind for a bit, this line from Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipeligo" attached itself indelibly, in my thoughts, to the entire conversation:
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Over the course of the last several hours, I've watched much of the internet heap opprobrium on those frustrated souls in Minneapolis that set fire to several blocks of their city. Their anger at the grotesqeries of "the law" that they face every day is palpable. Americans, especially Black Americans, won't wait forever for the most vile of injustices to stop. Eventually, they too will echo Solzhenitsyn, especially this passage:
"What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand?"
I'm not promoting Solzhenitsyn's observation as wise or just, I'm simply trying to describe the reality that no people will submit to being murdered, beaten, and tear-gassed with impunity forever.