A Boot in Your Face, A Knee on Your Neck

George Owell, describing life under totalitarian rule, asked his readers to "imagine a boot in your face, forever." 

Or, a knee on your neck.

For too many of our citizens, that takes no imagination at all. 

It's also said that history begins when the last witness dies; until then it's memory. If that is true, if God smiles, and if George Floyd is the last American to die for the "aggravating circumstance" of being black, our country is at least three generations away from that time when the viciousness of Jim Crow and the lynching era can be called history. 

What happened to George Floyd on May 25th, 2020, on that street in Minneapolis was viscerally maddening. The audio of him pleading with his killers, "Sir, I can't breathe, please," being taunted by men who were confident they would get away with it, is our national shame. 

Yes, Minneapolis, Hennepin County, Minnesota and the US Government appear to have had enough. What those police officers did, what was caught on video, appears to have sufficiently horrified enough people that someone will be held accountable. But the thug who knelt on George Floyd's neck and the men who stood by while he did it believed in their impunity. They thought nothing was going to happen to them. They taunted George Floyd and acted like it was all a lark. They did not behave like that in a vacuum.  That is our national shame, that they expected to get away with it.

George Floyd.was more than strange fruit his killers thought they left behind. He had a biography. He had a family, friends, hopes and a home. And he did not did not deserve to be suffocated in a gutter, hearing his killer's laugh as he lost consciousness.