Don't Just Look At The "After"

Demonstrations. Rioting. It's too easy to just sit back in out living rooms watching and shaking our heads: "How could they do all this to themselves? It's their neighborhoods, their jobs, their grocery stores, their reputations going down the tubes. They are just proving all who wish to consider them lesser are right."

I've heard the comments, the blaming, the head shaking, even from people who don't want to go there in their thinking.

However....

We now live, for good or no, in a society where cell phone cameras are everywhere. Videos show what actually happens in police vs. black confrontations, countering the "justifications" produced after the fact. In the reactions which follow, they also show just who is in the lead, actually turning protesting into rioting: white instigators.

We also now live, for good or no, in a society where ideas spread virally, where all can chose only to interact with others of their own (often previously hidden) viewpoints, and where provocateurs can push previously isolated nebulous viewpoints into extremism and even violence. But those forums aren't private. The more the merrier, the  more the braver. And the evidence is there. Statements are finally emerging from those with respected public forums, like Governor Tim Walz, directing the blame for the violence and the property damage onto white racists, coming in from outside to spread the damage to the rightness of the cause for protesting, changing it into blaming those wishing justice as being unworthy of it. Even Russian operatives are implicated.

Yep, those pesky Russians again. Putin's minions. Trump's buddies. His comments are incendiary, both in "dog whistle" form and out in the open. It's no secret that Trump has always been a racist, that he thinks a race war would be a good thing, not only diverting our attention away from his mishandling of Covid 19 so he can increase his reelection chances, but possibly actually behind his mishandling of it.

Covid 19 hits minorities harder. Economically challenged, they are less able to stay home, thus less healthy to begin with, therefore significantly more heavily impacted. Apparently that's not fast enough for Trump, who is also quite aware they are more likely to vote Democratic.

We can't fall for it. We can't just trail behind the protesters and come upon the damage inflicted and draw the stereotypical conclusions those who start the violence wish us to. We have to take as good a look at who's starting it as we do when looking at the original injustices which prompt the protesting.

Let's react to the whole truth.