Trump cracked open an ugly American white secret that previous racist presidents managed to conceal, deny, or massage. The public cracking culminated with George Floyd, a moment when white America could watch racism in action of 8 minutes of police murdering a black man begging for his life, crying for his mother as the white policeman who took his last breath, looked at the camera with all the arrogance of legal protection that we have granted him.
White America and the rest of the world could see this secret, legal brutality against black America and grasp a more profound truth about this country: that all along it has nurtured practices that under the wrong elected regime could topple its democracy. What we saw is democracy’s fragility. We realized that we were complicit in the undoing of democracy while supposedly lauding and singing its praises. Since the murder of George Floyd we began to experience the truth that the city on the hill was lip service, a self-deceptive lie, that the “city” was, and has been, a gated community of institutions that protected the power of privileged rich white men.
George Floyd moment was when America could see Martin Luther King’s statement that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and now it has materialized in the US Postal Office becoming Trump’s Jim Crow. We could have seen the writing on the wall when Trump came down the escalator calling Mexicans rapists, but we were still too comfortable and averted our eyes. After all, many of us are not Mexican. The Women’s March was outraged by his assault on women, but half of us are not women. Lawyers got into action to stop Trump’s attack on Muslims, but most of are not Muslims. When Nazis in Charlottesville shouted ‘’Jew will not replace us,” most Americans are not Jews. We could have seen in each case an attack on democracy, but we didn’t mobilize.
The protests all over the country after the murder of George Floyd were a moment of recognition that police brutality directed at black people was all too real. Moreover, white America was unable to skip over authorized brutality, that it has no color boundaries and that aggression could spill over to their own communities. Authorized criminality, giving legal cover to unlawful acts that deny people’s rights and seemed limited to a marginalized group, became mainstream. Covid-19 plays a part in creating a moment of the limits of brutality. It became clear that police brutality, like the pandemic virus, hit black America and minority America, yet invades white American as well. And we saw the invasion of brutality in the senseless cruelty of beating up people without color distinction, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, turning all protesters into vulnerable blacks.
If these images were not enough, Trump made it clear that cities and states led by Democrats would not get federal assistance in the pandemic. Now all Americans are suffering and it could have been avoided not only by Trump’s actions, but by our willingness to see how threatened our democracy was from the beginning.
The right to vote, denied to women until 1920 and for many Blacks until the 1960s, now faces Trump’s threat to deny white America this essential right. The fragility of our democracy is tangible, taking out sorting machines from post offices, and taking away the famous blue boxes from our streets. George Floyd gave us the gift of awareness so we can see with clarity that in destroying the postal office Trump is trying to destroy America.
We cannot let him. We must vote. We cannot let anyone or anything stop us from voting. We must vote for Biden/Harris, in a state like New York, because even though the popular vote does not matter in the electoral tabulation, the size of Biden’s popular plurality will be important if the Electoral College vote is challenged by Trump. We must vote in a state where Trump is expected to win because we do not know the outcome of the election before the votes are counted. And of course we must vote in a “battleground” state. We cannot tell you what to do, and how best to protect your health, but if you think your mail-in vote will not be counted, we strongly suggest voting in person, taking the proper precautions.
We are familiar with the famous motto inscribed on the main New York City post office building. “Neither rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” It’s a quotation from Herodotus, some 2500 years old. The Greeks and the Persians knew the value of messengers delivering their messages. So should we.
When the president of the United States tries to cripple the Post Office to destroy democracy, we cannot let him. We must do it for the memory of George Floyd, for countless others who have died through police brutality, for the young immigrants who were separated from their parents and kept in cages, and for the tens of thousands of Americans who are now dead because the president of the United States just didn’t give a damn about their health and safety. But above all we must do it for ourselves. Now is the summer of our discontent. Now is the time for all good people to stand up for their country.