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Well, he deserved to die, didn’t he? He fought, he ran, he grabbed the cop’s taser and fired it. And he was intoxicated, apparently. And he was blocking traffic.

“If an officer is hit with that Taser, all of his muscles will be locked up, and he’ll have the inability to move and to respond,” said a Georgia county sheriff, referring to the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta on June 12. “This was a completely justified shooting.”

Completely. Justified.

In 1953 author Simone de Beauvoir asked Must We Burn De Sade? regarding the French Marquis and his sadomasochistic books. Today, as the twin plagues of Covid-19 and police brutality disproportionately ravage African Americans, we’re likewise asking: Must Gone with the Wind be gone?

On June 10 - the birthday of Hattie McDaniel, who won one of the 1939 epic’s eight Oscars, including Best Picture - HBO Max blew GWTW off the streaming service’s lineup. As statues of historical figures linked to slavery and racism are being razed, removed and defaced at Bristol, London, Montgomery, Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Barbados, Antwerp, Belgium and beyond, the question is being raised: What should be done about televised/ cinematic systemic racism and bigoted, Confederate TV/movie monuments, like GWTW?

Here’s the text of a new bill in Congress: PDF.

Here’s a petition from Code Pink promoting it.

Needless to say, this is the best bill introduced into Congress in decades.

Here’s the ending:

“Congress supports moves to reduce the priority given to war in our foreign policy and our current war-based national economy by using significant cuts, up to $350,000,000,000 as detailed above, from current budget plans, while using the funds to increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

The details above in the text of the bill include:

(1) eliminating the Overseas Contingency Operations account and saving $68,800,000,000;

(2) closing 60 percent of foreign bases and saving $90,000,000,000;

(3) ending wars and war funding and saving $66,000,000,000;

If the whole state of Vermont, the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Davenport, Iowa, and even Oberlin, Ohio can change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day – could Columbus, Ohio be far behind? Sadly, yes.

Following the Ameriflora controversy in 1992 – the international flower festival at Franklin Park celebrating 500 years since Christopher Columbus invaded North America – Native Americans descended on Columbus City Council playing drums and chanting. Council members refused to change the name of Columbus Day, but as an immediate concession to the victims of genocide initiated by Columbus and to make the Native Americans go away, agreed that a week starting on Columbus Day would be designated Indigenous People’s Week. But we never heard anything about that again.

There were some victories: our city hasn’t held a Columbus Day parade since the 90s, the Santa Maria is thankfully gone, and activists successfully prevented a Christopher Columbus statue made by a Russian sculptor, six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, from being erected downtown.

Grassroots outrage and nationwide protests after Minneapolis cops murdered George Floyd have pushed much of U.S. corporate media into focusing on deadly police mistreatment of black people. The coverage is far from comprehensive on the subject of racism in the “criminal justice” system -- we’re still hearing very little about the routine violations of basic rights in courtrooms and behind bars -- yet there’s no doubt that a breakthrough has occurred. The last two weeks have opened up a lot more media space for illuminating racial cruelty.

But what about economic cruelty?

Media outlets routinely detour around reasons why African Americans and other people of color are so disproportionately poor -- and, as a result of poverty, are dying much younger than white people. The media ruts bypass confronting how the wealthy gain more wealth and large corporations reap more profits at the expense of poor and middle-income people.

“This was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.”

And the toppled statue of a 17th century slave trader, now at the bottom of Bristol Harbour, is suddenly more relevant than ever, as the cry for compassionate social order – sparked by the murder of George Floyd – begins to engulf the whole planet. Perhaps . . . oh, let us hope . . . we are at the point of real change, a shift in the collective consciousness that holds our social systems together.

In written Chinese, the word “crisis” is represented by two characters. One of these, taken alone, means “danger”. The other, by itself, means “opportunity”. A crisis nearly always leads to great change. There is a danger that this will be a change for the worse. But there also is the opportunity to change society for the better - to reform and improve it. Both paths are present in a crisis like our present one. We must strive with all our strength to make society take the right path.

Our present crisis

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is in itself a crisis, many American cities have erupted in massive protests over the senseless killing by police of yet another black man - George Floyd. The country is deeply divided. Throughout the world there have been anti-racist protests, partly in sympathy with the US protesters, and partly because racism exists in many countries.

The global elite is conducting a coup that is designed to destroy all of the key elements of human society. It is doing this by destroying the essence of what it means to be human, by destroying the nature of existing human relationships, and by destroying the political, economic and social institutions of nation states.

Intentionally or otherwise, the elite coup is also fast-tracking four paths to human extinction.

If this coup succeeds, the human individual will have been reduced to a digitized identity who lives in a ‘techno tyranny’ serving the global elite or Homo Sapiens will be extinct. There is no third option unless we can defeat the coup and stop key structures and processes being put into place.

Do we have long? According to some scholars, as explained below, Homo Sapiens is already ‘functionally extinct’. If this is the case, only a monumental global effort can give us even a remote chance of surviving.

By April 15, the number of Americans who died from coronavirus causes was officially tabulated at about 31,000. 

Failing to take control of the public health situation, what were they thinking in the White House? Maybe something like: OK, let’s see, what would be a really good distraction from everyone pointing their fingers at us – how about a deeply meaningful way to honor medical personnel who have risked their lives and suffered higher mortality than the rest of us for the past three months and, probably, well into the future?  

How about a whole bunch of flyovers across the nation by military warplanes designed to kill millions in moments? Perfect! And no chance of infection of the pilots! As President Trump put it on April 22: 

The killing of black man George Floyd by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has produced the highest level of national unrest seen in the United States since the 1960s. Tens of thousands of protesters are demonstrating against racism and perceived police brutality. As it also comes at a time of coronavirus pandemic and record unemployment, it has the potential to change the U.S. in fundamental ways. The core issue is that many on the left, as well as some on the right, see America’s police as something like an “occupying force,” increasingly self-serving enemies of the people rather than careful protectors of the taxpayers’ lives and property.