"This Is Not a Protest. This Is Chaos."

It was Keisha Lance Bottoms, mayor of Atlanta, who spoke those words.  And Mayor Bottoms was not the only American local official who expressed exactly that sentiment.

The death of black American George Floyd has led over the course of about a week to increasing levels of bereavement, helplessness, resentment, rage and finally, outburst. The latter has included looting and wanton destruction.

It wasn’t just George Floyd. It was all other black Americans killed by police, and by Americans who are not police, over weeks, and months, and years, and decades, and centuries. Some are recent and easy to name, and most are more remote and anonymous. Black Americans, and many other Americans, are “mad as hell, and [they’re] not gonna to take it any more,” to quote a line from the movie, “Network.”

This week is not the only time the protest has been like this. Often it’s much less powerful and raging, and sometimes, it has been like this.

But Mayor Bottoms, who is herself a black American, and rare other elected officials, have articulated something important. There’s a difference – and a critical one – between protest, even borne of intense frustration and anger, and more gratuitous and selfish, or even antisocial, mischief. The latter occurs under the guise of the former. Mayor Bottoms recognized that. And she called it what it was.

The same is true of the behavior of American police. An honest police chief, or an honest president, would say a version of what Mayor Bottoms said: “This isn’t law enforcement.  This is institutionalized racism. It’s arbitrary public execution. It’s symbolic genocide.”

(Boy, do I hate to dredge this up.  I complain vigorously whenever anyone else dredges it up.  But the fact is, we in BP have perpetrated our own less murderous version of the same thing.  I liked Ray Atesiano.  I thought he was a good guy.  He was a little out of his depth as police chief, because he wasn't a commanding enough public speaker, and he was too susceptible to the subversive and corrupting influence of people like Larry Churchman.  But I did like him.  I regret what he allowed to happen to himself.  But the buck stopped with him, and that's the way it had to be.)

It wouldn’t be easy for a Caucasian American person who holds any of the public’s trust to say what needs to be said of the police. And frankly, of Caucasian Americans.  I don’t imagine that it was entirely easy for Mayor Bottoms, who had to have relied on a lot of support from black Atlantans, just to get elected, and has now told them they’re behaving like bad children, to have said it.

I doubt it was easy for Colin Kaepernick to have done what he did. He certainly paid a price for it. I don’t know if he regrets the “stance” he took, even though he was completely right.

It seems that someone, though, has to admit that Caucasians in this country have hidden behind a lie. And a scam. Whether it’s real so-called police, even though some, like the person who assassinated Philando Castile, tried to claim they’d had inadequate training (how much training does an armed police officer need not to gun down entirely innocent citizens?), or chronologically adult children, like George Zimmerman, who seem to want to be policemen when they grow up (which they never will), they all need to stop hiding behind the trope about “law and order.” It isn’t. It’s lawlessness and disorder. It is, as Mayor Bottoms rightly called it, “chaos.”