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I was born in 1964, so I was much too young in 1968 to be
aware of the fires and the fury. In the mid-1970s, when President Richard
Nixon resigned, I was hardly attentive or mature enough to appreciate the
magnitude of the moment. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, really, that I
became a rapt and opinionated consumer of current events.
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So from then to now is the timeline — the context — for the
following statement: I have never before been so heartsick about the state
of America. I have never before felt so panicked about our future. We’re a
nation in terrible crisis, at a crossroads we must navigate with enormous
generosity of spirit and exquisite care. And especially with President
Trump at the helm, I’m not sure we’re up to that.
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I’m
heartsick and panicked because when I look at that video of the last minutes of
George Floyd’s life, I see not just unconscionable cruelty but
inexplicable failure. How is it that more than five decades since 1968, we still have such rampant police
brutality, such florid racism? Floyd’s fate wasn’t an aberration. It was an
emblem.
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I’m heartsick and panicked because of the internet. We’ve
confronted and survived social upheaval, urban unrest and pronounced
political schisms before, but not with Twitter. Not with Facebook. Not with
an information (and misinformation) ecosystem in which individuals curate
their sources of “news” to the point where they customize their realities,
consuming utterly different narratives, arriving at spectacularly divergent
conclusions and having their biases hardened like granite.
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Did you
read about the recent poll in
which 44 percent of Republicans said that Bill Gates was plotting to use a
coronavirus vaccine to implant microchips in our bodies? If you did, tell
me how we hold on to a healthy, functioning democracy with a citizenry so
crazily receptive to conspiracy theories — so perversely gullible.
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I’m
heartsick and panicked because the one-two-three punch of the coronavirus,
tens of millions of people plunged into unemployment and Floyd’s shocking
death may well be more than this already teetering country can withstand.
That series of stressors has exposed us to ourselves: our ludicrous
inequality, our capacity for ugliness. Less than six months ago, Trump
became only the third American president in history to be impeached, and
that’s almost never mentioned anymore. It’s nothing compared with the
national traumas since. That’s how dire these times of
ours are.
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I’m
heartsick and panicked because of all the cowardice I see, and while it’s
everywhere, it’s especially conspicuous among the Republicans who enable
Trump. They know that he’s rotten. They dread what he’ll say or do next.
Yet they want so selfishly not to provoke his wrath that they gag
themselves, and if they suffocate America in
the process, so be it.
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Mike
Allen of Axios related a quote from
an unnamed “senior White House official” who cringed at the exultation in
the White House over that photo op, no matter its wretched orchestration:
“I’ve never been more ashamed. I’m really honestly disgusted. I’m sick to
my stomach.”
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Then why
is the official still there, cowering in a cloak of anonymity? Trump can
only be Trump. The bad actors around him, including most Republican
politicians in Washington, have chosen to be little or no better.
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I’m heartsick and panicked because of what will happen in
November. It’s possible that Trump loses; that would be my current bet. But
if he does, he’ll promote division rather than healing by attacking the
legitimacy of the results, just as he has undermined other processes and
institutions that don’t bend readily to his whims. He’s determined to bury
anything that doesn’t flatter him.
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That’s another reason I’m heartsick and panicked: because the
designated caretaker of our future behaves more like its undertaker.
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And yet …
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There was that hug, an image of two people clinging to each
other that I now find myself clinging to.
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It
happened on Sunday night in Louisville, Ky., of all places. I say “of all
places” because Louisville is where Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American
emergency room technician, was fatally shot by police officers who,
executing a search warrant that had nothing to do with her specifically,
used a battering ram to enter her apartment. You can read in more detail
about the circumstances of her death in this account in The
Times.
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That
happened in March. Over the past week, Louisville has been the scene of
especially tense encounters between protesters and the police, and of
harrowing violence. On Monday, David McAtee was shot and killed just
outside of the restaurant he owned, YaYa’s BBQ, in what Louisville
authorities said was an exchange of gunfire involving Louisville Metro
police and members of the Kentucky National Guard. Pictures and videos from
Louisville portray a militarized police force and streets that look like
war zones.
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But a
video from Sunday night portrayed something else. Captured and shared by
Roberto Ferdman of Vice News, it showed a protester and a police officer
clutching each other. Hugging.
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“She
just went in for the hug, and the officer accepted,” Ferdman wrote in the tweet in which
the video appears. “Lasted almost a minute. Incredible.” Indeed.
And while it’s just one moment involving two people, it says something and
it means something. There’s hope in that hug.
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It doesn’t contradict and can’t compete with the images of
George Floyd being tortured. It doesn’t erase or excuse what happened to
Breonna Taylor. It’s not closer to the norm than those injustices. Given
too much weight, it’s a distraction.
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But it’s a reminder that within our messy humanity, there’s
a yearning for unity that can be every bit as powerful as any impulse for
division. There’s tenderness. While there are too many Americans who thrill
to confrontation and find hate more intoxicating than love, there are more,
in my opinion, who want what the protester and police officer in that video
seem to want: connection, healing, peace.
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The video went viral and
has been watched about three million times.
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