Request to readers: PLEASE do not take this as any kind of endorsement of shooting people in the back.  Don’t be a Trumpster, read past the headlines.

Like many other people around the world, the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck is burned into my brain.  Like many other horrors I’ve witnessed in my life, I only have to close my eyes to see it.

We live in a world where every time you think you’ve seen it all, the next day proves you wrong.

We saw Jason Van Dyke shoot Lacquan McDonald sixteen times and I’ve heard first hand testimony of McDonald’s arrival at Mt. Sinai Hospital.

Scary shit.

It was just a week before George Floyd’s death that we saw Ahmoud Arbery chased down and murdered by three Nazi pricks, one of whom actually provided the video.

It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to be a Nazi prick. All evidence seems to point to the contrary.

NOTE OF CLARIFICATION:  I don’t try to differentiate between the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists/nationalists, run-of-mill racists, the American Nazi Party or the United Brotherhood of Complete Assholes.

They’re all Nazi pricks.

I don’t know if anything can be inferred from the fact that they all seem to love #PresidentPorkyPig, but if the swastika fits……

The thing about the video that increasingly holds my focus is Derek Chauvin’s left hand, casually stuffed into his pants pocket.

Chauvin was not afraid for his life, he didn’t seem to have a care in the world.  He just kneeled there on George Floyd’s neck like he was in church, and maybe he was.  We don’t don’t know where Chauvin prays.

Derek Chauvin was cavalier, the picture of a callous, cold and calculating executioner.  A man was dying under his weight and he sat there like he was pondering dinner choices.

When I was a kid, we used to fry ants on the sidewalk by focusing the sun on them with a magnifying glass.  I probably didn’t feel much about it at the time, but I may have felt more than Derek Chauvin felt as he crushed the life out of George Floyd.

It would have been wrong for Derek Chauvin to have shot George Floyd, but it would have made it easier to cast Chauvin as a bad apple with bad judgement.

Instead, we get a devastating blow to the solar plexus of humanity.  A wanton disregard for life that threatens to become yet another new normal.

We are a nation of pseudo patriots, luxuriating in the moral superiority of fake outrage.  We condemn a man peacefully exercising his constitutional right and civic duty, but feign horror when peaceful protests fail and violence erupts.

We are offended by a black man kneeling during a song so lame it wouldn’t make the country charts, but find ways-all disingenuous-to blame black, unarmed men for their own demise.

The image of Derek Chauvin nonchalantly executing Floyd while staring defiantly into a video camera may have taken us to a place from which we may never return.

If you close your eyes, you might even feel the ground moving under your feet.  Like all seismic shifts, it could go either way.

I’ll remain hopeful, but not overly optimistic.

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