Along with my Face Mask o’ the Day, I just had to don a Two-fer o’ Ties o’ the Day. That’s the best way I can illustrate my admiration for law enforcement AND for those who seek to bring attention to injustices near and far by public protest. First, let me say that the two “sides” are not mutually exclusive. Most cops want the justice system to work more justly. Most protesters don’t want innocent people and their property—cops or otherwise—to be harmed just because they exist.
I have been to my share of rallies, protests, marches, and vigils. When I lived in the Washington D. C. area, I felt like I was at the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial in support of some cause or other every weekend. It was exciting and enlightening. I learned so much. Over time, I refined my political and social thinking. In fact, I refined my critical thinking skills by light years, by being in the middle of the business of the U.S. of A.
But honestly, I got tired. Long before the political divides we live in now, I got tired of them. Oh, I still have all the fight in me to make the planet a better place for more than just me, but I haven’t been to a rally/protest in a long time. And I prob won’t show myself at another one. Why? The simple answer is this: There are always a few people—on every side—who lack civility. In other words, there are always a few wing-nuts who ruin a good get-together for everybody.
Last Saturday’s protest in SLC was a perfect example of what I’m talking about. A bunch a folks get together to protest the death of a criminal suspect, George Floyd, at the hands of cops in Minneapolis. The SLC cops are at the SLC protest to protect the protestors from other civilians who might do them harm for exercising their right to assemble and to speak. The gathering is going along peaceably. And then a couple of fruit loops decide it’s too quiet. They drag a few others into their mayhem and tip a cop car. Oh, this is fun! Let’s start it on fire! And so on. Meanwhile, most of the protestors aren’t interested in this crap. They leave or at least distance themselves. But of course, the only thing that makes good viewing is the tipping and burning of cars, so the tv cameras don’t follow what most people are doing—which is behaving like civilized citizens.
We’ve all seen the group mentality create dipsticks out of otherwise reasonable people. We’ve seen it happen in profound situations as well as in situations that are near unimportant. I remember being around this kind of wing-nut fervor once was when I was in high school. It was football season, and we Delta Rabbits were set to play our arch-rival, the Millard Eagles, at the end of the week. A bunch of us packed ourselves into a car and drove the 30 miles to Millard High the night before the game. We toilet-papered and egged shrubs, sidewalks, and windows at the school. This was par for the course during rivalry week annually. Some Eagles were most likely doing the same thing over at DHS at that very moment. A little temporary mess to get the rivalry to a fever pitch is fun. And then one person in our group, without any of the rest of us having any idea what was coming, pulled out a hammer and a can of spray paint and completely destroyed one of the school’s eagle mascot statues. It crossed the line. Our friend was so proud of the destruction he’d created, but he seemed suddenly foreign to all of us. This was beyond the point of what we were up to.
We shook our heads and walked back to the car—with all the wind sucked out of our prank sails. A small, but significant-to-others, object got destroyed. Worse, even though it seemed a relatively tiny bad deed, we never again felt the same ease and trust with our kidhood friend. On top of it all, we knew our friend would not have done what he did if we hadn’t been doing what we were doing. We knew we were implicated in his behavior. This could not be repaired. I could tell you how his life turned out, but I don’t want to. It wasn’t a very happy or very long story.
