This is true.
I hope things go well in the Twin Cities this week. I had planned on being back there on Wednesday (I was there for 3 days last week) but have cancelled plans to travel to my shops in Minneapolis and St. Paul. My Minneapolis shop was right where the rioting was last year. Driving around there last month and the physical scars to the city are still very visible. I sure hope the jury does the right thing.
Whether or not they are feeling it (and I'm sure they are feeling it) the fate of the city -- and maybe more -- is really resting in the hands of the Chauvin jury. If they fail to convict this country is going to see rioting the likes of which we have never seen before. Last year will seem like a fun-filled block party compared to the violence that will accompany a not guilty verdict or probably even a hung jury. At this point the fate of Derek Chauvin is not really what is important. If things go haywire you Twin Cities posters stay safe and be careful.
I think what saves the country is Dump lost. Even if the jury hangs, I think (hope) there is a feeling on the street that help is coming and things are changing. Dump, and the GOP writ large, is a come to Jesus moment for white centrists. Before they were able to kid themselves that "things aren't perfect but we've come a long way" and other excuses not to do anything (especially, not to pay anything). But those myths have been exploded. White Center-Left and even some white Left have had the scales fall from their eyes, finally, and have realized this country is never more than one depression from Germany 1932, because there is an immense, unreconstructable racist base at the core of the Right, which will never become better and never grow up. We are just going to have to out-vote those orcs, every election,
forever, to keep them as far from the levers of power as possible.
America had a 50-year nap in many ways. In economics they bought Reaganomics' sweet lie that taxes could always remain low on everyone, especially the rich and upper middle class. Now we see that just hollows out the country from the inside until one pandemic puts us on par with a third world nation. In social issues they bought that as long as there were some rich black celebs that meant Racism Over, until the last decade has proven slavery never ended, the incarceration state and Jim Crow 2 are simply the morphing of white supremacy and apartheid to a different form.
The country is waking up. I woke up that violence, which a good way to get attention, can't be The Plan. Revolution can't be aspirational because it leads to giving up on voting and institutional forms and that cedes the ground either to the enemy or to "moderate" friends are who are fat and happy and will never discomfort themselves as long as they don't see atrocities on teevee.
We are fighting the actual malevolence of the Right and the self-congratulatory lethargy of the Center, but importantly
we have the tools to win in our institutions, our people, and our morale. For fifty years the "nothing ever changes" or "this country is fucked forever" people dominated the conversation, and they were a clarion call to do nothing. And, unsurprising, through all that time the Right gained, because they had a clear and simple message: repeal the 20th Century. Go back to the old hierarchical order of rich white males as an aristocracy and as "real Americans." But I believe the Left and even the Center-Left under 40 has finally learned and is poised to make a leap.
tl; dr: I believe we are coming into an age when people recognize that pundits have nothing to say to them, that the Democratic party is a mechanism for us
and we must seize it, and that consumer power now so dominates our economy that we can shake the corporate state to its knees just by buying or not buying to our ethics. The ubiquitous ironic coolness, which started in the black jazz clubs of the 1930s and then was aped by the commercial state as a method of dulling our senses and destroying our outrage in order to pacify us, is finally being rejected for some honest old school
caring. Cool is dead. I've never been so happy to be obsolete along with the rest of the cynicism and poser world weariness of the Boomers and Gen X.
