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On Not Wanting to Rest Content
When the George Floyd incident first happened, you could almost feel where this was going. With the release of the bodycam footage, here we are.
If something has a pattern to it, and keeps happening, you would think folks would ask why that pattern repeats. “I am sure,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr from his Birmingham jail cell to clergyman who were bothered by the demonstrations that had landed him there, “that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.”
Superficial social analysis is the order of the day some 57 years later. Our day and age spins quickly on news cycles full of effects with little time for causes. Spinning so fast, and with a profound ignorance despite having the entirety of human knowledge available in the palms of our hands, patterns go unnoticed. Too much bobbing between waves of information and events, trying to not drown and be overtaken by the next one, to notice things like the tides.
Contentment with easy answers that handwave the struggle without examining the cause is a dangerous thing.
When the George Floyd incident first happened, you could almost feel where this was going…
