The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Things are heating up in Covid-plagued America. Friday night the Racist-in-Chief spent some time in his underground bunker where Secret Service agents entombed him, ostensibly out of fear for his life when protesters stormed the White House perimeter, but possibly to keep him from making any further statements about … well … anything. Radicals outside were already tossing gasoline, why add more fuel to the flames? Two days later and presumably out of the bunker, the President has yet to urge calm or call for healing. Instead he twitters his little rhyming threat that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Probably should have stayed in the safe room below without his smartphone. Hopefully the SS agents learned their lesson.

Enough is sometimes enough. The video of the cop killing a handcuffed, prostate black suspect by taking a knee the way Colin Kaepernick did on the football field to protest exactly this sort of injustice was plenty enough to jolt a sleepy populace to wide awake nightmare. Kaepernick paid a price for his prescience and this white cop will pay one too. The rest of us, some on the burning streets, some watching safely from our self-imposed isolation, we will too.

I suspect, though, the message will be fairly muddled. One placard I saw read THE REVOLUTION STARTS NOW! Right, Comrade. I was in Madison, Wisconsin during the Viet Nam riots after the assassination of King and Kennedy, tear gas, smashed storefronts and University buildings, looting, mayhem, call in the National Guard. We thought the revolution was starting back then too. Ho ho. Nixon went on to bomb Cambodia, the country went its merry way and all us protesters ended up with families and middle class jobs. So much for our little rebellion.

Fast forward fifty years, half a century. Racism is endemic, income inequity is pervasive, corporatocracy rules. The divisions in this country are as wide as they were back in the 60’s. The economy may come back after this pandemic lockdown, but I suspect the jobs for a lot of folks won’t. Stockholders will be okay, but not the people who make minimum wage, not the folks whose jobs are outsourced to robotics. There’s a smoldering rage just under the surface of sunny America and we’re watching it live on TV or on the streets.

Maybe it is the beginning of the revolution. Back in the summer of 1970 the Armstrong brothers and two cohorts bombed the Army Math Research Center and killed an intern in the Pharmacy building next door, pretty much putting the knee on the throat of that revolution where it died with a small whimper. I was wrong then about the optimism for change and I’m probably wrong now. But it feels like, once again, it’s hard to breathe.

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