A jittery nation watching the trial for the murder of George Floyd, sits through PTSD and has a chance to end the racist and violent drug war.
Nearly a year after the incident, The trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is in full swing. The incident traumatized a Minneapolis neighborhood, then a country, then the whole world as Chauvin’s unrelenting knee drains the life from Floyd, leaving the neighborhood to watch his lifeless body carted away and inciting a summer of protests that tipped over into violence and destruction in some communities. Yes, the violence is wrong but it’s understandable how this can happen. America is war weary, tired from incidents the spark disbelief only to have them happen again and again in a repetitive pattern. The stories vary but the themes are the same, a muddled mess of boundaries, the clash of rights and wrongs and a country stratified by patriotism and exasperation from the unhealed oozing wound of racial strife. Maybe it’s Michael Brown, maybe Breonna Taylor, but the story is familiar. Police kill blacks person in the name of the drug war. We are, after all, at war against drugs for decades now, wars have casualties so why are we surprised?
In America, black people pay a higher price in war. They did in the Revolutionary war. The first casualty was a free man, Crispus Attucks, killed in the Boston Massacre. African Americans were asked to fight for “freedom” while the colonists missed the great irony of the request. The truth is, black people may have been better off had the Crown prevailed. The Uk was already in the process of phasing slavery out, declaring it “a sin”. The story continues, throughout the American experience. Black men paid a higher price in the civil war, as thanks for their service, Lincoln wanted to send them back to Africa or a native-like reservation. Additionally, Lincoln issued a proclamation that freed slaves weren’t allowed to have a gun. To Americans, not being able to participate in the sacrosanct experience of gun ownership is the same as immediate marginalization and an invitation to be a victim of terrorists. The same is true of WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. It is acutely true of the war on drugs. When Nixon issued the declaration that drugs were “public enemy #1” what he was trying to say was “I can’t make being black illegal so we have to disrupt their culture and justify social controls” HR Haldeman later admitted this was the plan all along.
America’s longest and most costly war is the war on drugs. To date, we’re up over $1 trillion (does anyone even know what a trillion dollars means?) and 50 years. It cost the taxpayer $9.2 million, everyday, to incarcerate nonviolent drug offenders. (AmericanProgress.org). The numbers are staggering, but what about the human toll? The strain on the foster care system and grandparents as families are broken up over this issue is prevalent but seldom considered. What about The tenuous race relations and the very understandable fear people of color have of the police? What is the emotional toll for the long reaching tentacles of the drug war?
The trial for the murder of George Floyd offers our nation a chance at a requiem for the sins of the drug war. It’s a chance to have a national dialogue about what crime is and what it’s not. It’s a chance for America to be honest about being a giant dysfunctional family, thinking it can control its voracious appetites for drugs with supply-side management. Every codependent spouse knows, taking the bottles might make them feel better, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
As long as we have a drug war, we will have incidents similar to that of George Floyd. The footage from the police body came revealed what Officer Chauvin said immediately after the incident “he was a sizable guy and he was on something”. Sure that’s absurd on its face but we’re at war, right? And Black people always pay a higher price in war. If you’re big and your black, you’re likely on something and that seems to be reason enough to implement tactics of war. The same was said about Michael Brown in the Ferguson, MO incident. Brown was a big kid and “known to smoke weed”. Is there anything more docile than a doughy kid, stoned and looking for junk food? That the threat of a golden retriever wanting its tennis ball but if we’re at war, I guess there are casualties.
LAPD has a long history of this kind of a response, and not just Rodney King. One of the first things said about Rodney King was his past DUI. LAPD has other incidents of deaths under police custody and a common narrative of “he was on drugs”.
The racial divide in America is deep, wide, full of alligators and unhealed. It’s an infected wound, a dead cat under the house that nobody wants to pull out and bury. It’s gone on for centuries and it didn’t start with the drug war but the drug war is the latest vehicle that drives it. We will never solve issues on the border, we will never heal the wounds of the past as long as we robustly fund a war on drugs. It’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on people, primarily people of color. People like George Floyd, imperfect, flawed, struggling, but a mixed bag of good and bad traits. Nobody deserves to die because they are “sizable and on something”. There will be more of these incidents bless we have a concerted effort to have a requiem for this 50 year nightmare.