Awaiting The Next Protest

THE PROTESTS which erupted all across America's fruited plain after the murder of George Floyd have not ended; it has simply become insufficiently for the corporate media to pay much attention to them. They have become more violent, and more amorphous, as angry, alienated underserved and underemployed people take advantage of the gatherings to enact gratuitous violence, with no specific underlying cause to protest, simply violence for the sake of violence, to release pent up anger, of the sort most of us experience. During the first two weeks of June, I attended seven "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations. My favorite was in a town of about two thousand people, where one fine mild summer day about fifty local high school girls gathered together on main street, adorned with "I Can't Breathe" signs, the works, and really let 'em have it. I was the only male, and the only senior citizen present. Proudly I accepted my role as the "token little old man", bestowed upon me by a pair of fifteen year old cuties. When I mentioned that I could remember MLK marching in the streets surrounded by police dogs and angry cops, could remember white only drinking fountains, could remember the murder of Malcom X, they girls seemed a bit confused at first, because I look young for me age, but, they seemed to understand. We all wore masks. All this, in a tiny town deep in the heart of the confederacy in which odds are, nearly everyone will vote to reelect Donald Trump because, even if he is a bit crude at times, he at least is a defender of the unborn, a conservative, allegedly, a Republican, and unlike most liberal democrats, a Christian, so it is said,  The anti systemic racism protests faded away in our area, and I miss them dearly. whatever to do on a clear, sunny Covid 19 self quarantined day? We radicals must carry one. Somewhere, sometime, there will be other protests, another unjust war, another election of a tyrant, some reprehensible act of American imperialism in some remote country, a regime change for the sake of American corporate profit. We only need wait, patiently. In the United States of Avarice, the next protest is only a heartbeat away.