June 2020: A Surreal Moment in America
Disclaimer. This post has nothing to do with beer. It is a brief reflection on the surreal moment in which we find ourselves—the most unsettled and confusing time in my 52 years.
On a mild, sunny evening Portlanders gathered to vent their frustration. It was the third night in a row, and the event had no organizer, no goal (protests were happening around town), and no itinerary. The precipitating incident was the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the culmination of a spate of inexplicable Black murders over the past months. I joined the largest gathering, which began as a march in Laurelhurst Park and meandered toward and then past a sheriff’s station before, hours later, making its way downtown. The police were the object of focus, with chants of “Say his name, George Floyd!” and “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Outside the sheriff’s station, they briefly exhorted officers to join them in the march. (Later, in downtown Portland, some PPD officers did.) But the headline purpose belied a deep well of confusion, frustration, and anger aimed more broadly at … everything.
So much is happening in the country right now. No matter what your political stripe, things feel deeply chaotic, as if they’re spinning away from a center that has lost all gravity. We were already a deeply divided country when the year entered its long, quadrennial slog toward a November election. These contests are frustrating to everyone because they advance nothing but the stalemate that has afflicted politics for the better part of 30 years. Both sides feel they are losing a trench war, and as a result, the changes happen outside our control, as consequences of executive action or judicial fiat. In our impotence, we have become at turns angry, depressed, despairing.
And then, of course, the virus arrived. We know the numbers: 106,000 confirmed dead (actual number much higher), forty million out of work (actual number much higher). Government has just stopped working. At the national level, the President has decided to hole up and ignore the problems, consistently undermining the recommendations of his medical team. At the local level, people are left to fend for themselves, with greater or lesser degrees of help from their governments. As one example, we learned on Saturday that only half the 450,000 who have claimed unemployment in Oregon have received any money. (The governor fired the program director yesterday—but I doubt few are heartened by the change.)
As these crises unfold, we have begun to learn of the disproportionate cost born by people of color and the poor. Many were stuck in crappy jobs as “essential workers,” forced to brave the pandemic to pay their bills. Those populations had less access to health care, greater preexisting health conditions, and have died in wildly disproportionate numbers.
And then the killings started. Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. A woman called the cops on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park because he had the temerity to ask her to leash her dog as the law required. It seemed like something has snapped inside our brains. We took to the streets because we couldn’t do anything else.
Portland is famous for our protests and mass gatherings. It’s nothing for 10,000 of us to gather. Give us a war and we can muster 50,000 without breaking a sweat. But it’s not just Portland. My friend texted photos of a march on a street near his home in Beaverton of middle-class, middle-aged suburbanites, not many of whom have never before set Nike to pavement for social justice. Hundreds of protests (thousands?—who knows?) broke out yesterday in cities and towns large and small.
We are certainly mad about George Floyd. After seeing the video, many literally became quaking mad. (I did.) But when we gathered last night, he wasn’t solely on our minds. The Portland protests have ended up downtown and they fray in the early morning hours into chaos and destruction. The intentions are unclear. last night protesters trashed an AFL-CIO office in Washington DC because …?
We don’t live in Minnesota; we can’t hold the police to account. Yet people do want accountability. They’re tired of the stalemate, of feeling trapped by systems they can’t control. They want justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery—but they want more.
People have a sense something has gone terribly, possibly irretrievably wrong, and it’s causing them to take to the streets with no greater plan than to be heard. I’ve been seeing this MLK quote a lot over the past few days: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” It’s resonating with people because they feel voiceless and have felt so for years. George Floyd isn’t the only thing they protest, but his murder has become the symbol of how people are feeling—it was so egregious, so unwarranted, so visibly bigoted. We utter his name because it speaks of so many complaints.
It’s June first. The economy will continue to worsen; the virus will hang around, killing thousands every week. That interminable election is still five months off. People’s bank accounts are running dry; businesses are increasingly closing permanently. We sheltered for months, hoping for the best. Things got worse. Now we’re taking to the streets.