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As I watch the rioting, looting, burning, and wholesale destruction in our cities I find it difficult to know where to start. The media is filled with wrong ideas, wrong words, outright lies, political bias, and convoluted logic.
Truth and common sense is nowhere to be found. I'm torn between wanting to keep the news on to find out what the hell is going on in my city and my country, and wanting to shut it off because I can't stand listening to the placating liberal bias, lies, half-truths, and stupidity I hear from the news people.
The match that lit the fire was the video of a killing of a black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The video went viral, the media jumped on it, people took to the streets, and now cities across America are being assaulted by so-called "justice warriors."
After a week there is still no end in sight to the hostility in the streets that threatens all law-abiding citizens.
Nobody is justifying what that cop did. Everyone who has seen the video is disgusted. It looks to be an obvious example of police brutality, that's for sure. But after that, I don't know too much more about it. How many of us do?
I don't know what lead up to the killing, I don't know why the officer did what he did, what was in his mind. And even though everyone I hear in media has attributed the action of the cop to "systemic white racism," I don't know for a certainty that race had anything to do with it. How do we know for a fact that the cop was a racist who wanted to kill black people? Maybe he was. It's possible.
But maybe this particular cop was just a vicious, cruel, son of a bitch who would have done the same thing to a white man just as easily.
The officer who committed the act, along with three other officers, was immediately fired. Three or four days later the cop who killed the black suspect was arrested, charged with 3rd degree murder and manslaughter. Protestors said it wasn't done fast enough. They said the charge wasn't harsh enough; it should have been murder in the 1st degree. They asked why the other three officers weren't charged. The protesters took to the streets and it began.
Once a thing like this begins you can throw common sense, logic, reason, and truth right out the window.
No one is listening. The brain stops functioning and pure emotion and adrenaline kicks in. The instigators and the race provocateurs get into action. Then the young people looking for excitement and a cause to be a part of hear about it on social media and get involved. Finally, the troublemakers, the anarchists, ANTIFA and other America-hating thugs join the crowd and that's when things explode.
Almost three months of nationwide lockdowns have been a major factor in contributing to the lawless riots we're experiencing now. I warned about this very thing in my JWR column dated March 27th titled "How Long?" I wrote the following:
"And what about the teenagers and twenty-somethings with their raging hormones and natural aggression? Participating in sports activities offered youth a safe outlet for pent up energy, and attending sporting events gave them mental exercise. All the other things young people engaged in like music concerts, getting together with friends, and even shopping have been stopped.
How long before the tensions and stress of doing nothing boil to the surface in these young people? How long before they decide to rebel and gather in the streets, not because they are necessarily bad, but out of boredom and utter frustration? If they begin to think that the end of the world is close at hand we'll see panic like never before.
We have so many closed stores now. Closed stores loaded with merchandise, in some cases really valuable merchandise. At what point will looting begin? Nobody wants to say this, or even think it, but I've lived in Los Angeles all my life and I've seen what mobs can do. Looting, destroying, and killing is part and parcel of panicked angry people, especially people in despair. I've also seen police stand by helplessly and simply watch as these rioting mobs took over whole blocks of neighborhoods."
How did I know this would happen? Am I a genius? A soothsayer? No, simply common sense and experience lead me to this obvious conclusion. It was going to occur sooner of later, all it needed was one final straw and a match to light the fire. George Floyd was that straw, lockdowns and economic collapse was the match.
One other thought. Something bizarre is going on here. Something bigger than marchers protesting a killing. What are we to make of police officers, some commanders, "taking a knee" with the protesters in the streets? When a former four-star general, Michael Hayden, tweets an upside-down flag what is he saying?
When Secretary of Defense Mark Esper says he does not support President Trump invoking the Insurrection Act (which is a president's Constitutional right) to bring law and order to our streets, we have to ask what is really going on here? Whose side are these people on?
We live in frightening times.
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JWR contributor Greg Crosby, former creative head for Walt Disney publications, has written thousands of comics, hundreds of children's books, dozens of essays, and a letter to his congressman. He's been a JWR contributor since 1999.