Crowds of people demanding justice in the middle of a pandemic is a terrifying and thrilling vision. A risk-ratio analysis keeps circling back to “I can’t breathe,” the grim vision of a man being killed in broad daylight, on camera, for nine long, terrible minutes, by men who have pledged to support and serve. And behind that a history whose undeniability has been tested to the extreme by racist actions and inactions that have allowed the examples of police failings (violence, murder) to accumulate unchecked for, now, hundreds of years.
But why now, in the middle of a pandemic, when “social distance” is the order of the day? It’s not restlessness after so many weeks cooped up. It’s not a coincidence, either, or an inescapable irony of mismatched timing. The massive, worldwide protests for Black Lives Matter are, in part, supported by the fact that so many people are out of work right now.
The Minnesota City Council announced they would dismantle the police force and build something new and better. Los Angeles and other places are defunding the police. Re-imagining the police force and re-prioritizing our funding and framing of community policing is a miraculous, necessary consequence of a level of engagement purchased in part by the pandemic. Important and long-overdue policy changes are the direct result not just of the need for them–that need has been urgent and undeniable for a long time. The unstoppable expression of that need, day upon day of protest, has finally forced the issue. And that protest is facilitated by this extra time people have to engage.
What might we be able to do if we instituted reparations for slavery? What creativity and political transformation would be seeded by giving people the wages long owed them and the time that would free?
When we look at the knot of policy crisis and scientific truth facing us around climate catastrophe, we can see that we need the full scope of human response--not to shore up an old, failing economic structure, but to face and transform the realities we are caught in, the fires, floods, and droughts that are shaping our lives and our future.
Imagine if everyone had universal health care and a basic living income. No matter what. Right now, people could be making decisions based on science and public health best practices instead of on shoring up an economy that, even in the best of times, is failing many of its people–truly, if we take moral considerations into account, it is failing all of us. And going forward we could re-envision every corrupt element of this system. Why not? We could march together into a new day.
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