The Unheard
Dr. King called riots the language of the unheard. That "unheard" is too passive a description. This element of society isn't unheard, it's forcibly silenced and held in place with a knee on its neck. The murder of George Floyd resonated so deeply because it wasn't like so many of the swift, brutal incidents we've grown so shockingly accustomed to. There was no sudden spray of bullets into unarmed black bodies. This was a slow, merciless, brutal suffocation. A killing horrifying not because it illustrated indifference, but rather the enjoyment taken in slowly snuffing out a life.
And too many people saw themselves in George Floyd. Too many people felt that knee in their neck. Too many people know that if not for the video, those officers would not have been fired. If not for these protests, there wouldn't have been an arrest. And why do they know it? Because they feel that knee.
What is your avenue of recourse when every image of the police is them beating and killing people who look like you without remorse? When every day you see how there exists a different set of laws and punishments for you? Who do you turn to when the law is written to keep you from getting out from under that knee? When you look back across generations and see that knee pushing down on the necks of countless thousands desperately pleading that they can't breathe?
What do you do when you march, you assemble as is the right the founders of the country determined was given by God, and are met with tear gas in the streets? When they shoot you with rubber bullets? When the President of the United States sits in his office threatening to unleash vicious dogs and weapons on protestors in the nation's capital and quotes one of the most notorious racist lawmen of his lifetime in his threats to unleash military responses against civilians?
What do you do when you feel that knee pressing down on you all the way from the highest authority in the country, all the way down to the most freshly minted badge on the streets?
When you have no recourse, when your options are keep choking or explode, sometimes even an entire society built to enforce the idea that you just need to be more polite about your strangulation can't contain the explosion.
Innocent people absolutely get swept into it. Explosions are indiscriminate. We can be mad about that and want better while still recognizing those doing the damage did not cause the situation. How many years of violence and flames can a person hold inside them? And why did no one in charge do anything to quell those fires before it was too late?
In this case, as in others, there are definitely those attempting to spread the damage, to delegitimize the riot, the language of the oppressed, into seeming like an animalistic snarl. But it is a language. It is a voice, and whatever else it might say, it always starts with the howl of ‘we have had enough and there is nothing else we can do’.
Maybe the violence or the destruction is too much for you. Maybe you believe that no matter how much they are gassed or beaten or shot at or killed, protestors should never be anything but peaceful. Maybe you believe humans simply shouldn't have a breaking point. Maybe you just hate interruptions in your life. Maybe you value physical property over human life. Maybe you don't want to face the questions of how it came to this so you only view events in the narrow scope of the immediate surrounding events.
But historically, economically, politically, socially, psychologically, there always comes a breaking point. And we've hit it. These people will be heard.
Of course, people will still choose to hear what they want to hear. Maybe this time the language will be clearer. I don't know.
So yes, it's easy to immediately jump on the side of "oh, I don't want trouble," "I don't agree with this destruction," "protests should only be peaceful." It's remarkably simple to take that higher road, and don't get me wrong, it is the higher road. The morally superior position is the one that condemns violence in all its forms. But take a moment to be glad you have the luxury of being on that road. Many, many people don't. Because they don't have the bandwidth to worry about societal morals.
They just want to breathe.
