It is amazing how rapidly the world is shifting right now.
To reflect for a moment, the following things happened all in the last week:
- Mitt Romney marched with a group of evangelicals(!) in support of Black Lives Matter. You can complain about Mitt Romney mostly aligning with the other Republicans when it comes to his voting record, but he’s done more to stand up to Trump than any other Republican including voting in favor of his removal during the impeachment trial. We should celebrate this sort of behavior as it encourages other Republicans to defect and normalizes that any sane and decent person should stand up and declare their opposition to structural racism.
- Numerous confederate statues and other monuments to slavery all over the South that have been fought over for decades are coming down.
- Multiple large cities around the US are looking to dramatically reduce police budgets and reallocate tasks currently handled by police to new groups. This would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago.
- Most people I know are spending a lot of time earnestly learning about the US’s racist past and present. It’s in the national zeitgeist in a way that it has never been during my lifetime, and I hope it stays that way until there’s a shift in legal and cultural norms.
- The city of DC renamed a street to “Black Lives Matter Plaza” two blocks from the White House. I realize it’s a purely symbolic gesture, but this is again evidence of something as close to a reckoning around racism as I’ve seen in my lifetime. Australia had a similar reckoning around its treatment of Aboriginal Australians a few years ago.
- There are large peaceful protests in not just every major American city, but also many small and relatively conservative Bay Area suburbs.
Meanwhile: - Donald Trump threatened a violent showdown by threatening to use the Insurrection Act to directly deploy the US military against US citizens due to some relatively small riots mixed in with large peaceful protests. The Insurrection Act is usually applied in cases where a state governor requests the support, but in this case, no state governor requested it. The last time that happened was in 1963, when Kennedy used the National Guard to enforce desegregation laws in the south. This was another time of very rapid shifting, during which the racist Dixiecrats (pro-segregation Democrats) gave up on the Democratic party and started going for Republicans like Nixon.
- One of the most senior members of the military has hinted that they don’t take orders from Trump, but instead from the Constitution. This makes me feel that any sort of Trump-led coup is significantly less likely.
- Police in Minneapolis are behaving like teenage gangs, slashing the tires of an entire parking lot full of cars for fun because they might be the cars of protestors. They must be the out-of-control vandals and thugs Trump warned us about. It seems strange to be surprised by minor vandalism when police have taken many innocent lives, but I think it’s their complete abandonment of any pretense of keeping order or catching criminals that’s the surprise.
- Many police departments nationwide continue to demonstrate how bad they are at their jobs, even with the whole world watching. It’s a weird disconnect where they’re still in the frame of being able to act with impunity due to qualified immunity laws, and they don’t realize the world might be shifting under their feet.
This is one of those times that your kids are going to ask you about, so pay close attention and find a way to contribute.
What other shifts are you all noticing?