Keep Hope Alive
It is sometimes found in the most unlikely places
A strange thing happened in America on Memorial Day [5/24/2020], a portion of our soul turned brittle and died; but not before, someone filmed a video of it. A young 17-year-old girl did something remarkable; she filmed that snuff video — though she could not have known it at the time. I understand that these movies exist on some kind of black market for them or in some weird fetish underground world; however, as a nation, we have all witnessed, repeatedly in some cases, the life leaving the body of a human being. A killing before our eyes was hardly anything new, but this time something was different. It was not fake, it was not a reenactment and we did not all buy the same movie. Plain, simple, and horrifying — at least to me — was the slow, painful, and deliberate death of a man named George Floyd, as a knee pressed into his neck for almost 9 minutes. Floyd was not involved in an altercation, no!, this was done with complete indifference by thugs disguised as police officers in the great city of Minneapolis. I remember feeling freaked out by the Nicholas Cage film 8mm [a film that delved into the seedy underbelly of tracing the truths of a possible snuff film] that I could only watch it once. Years later it felt surreal to witness this phenomenon happening in real-time, as four police disguised thugs killed a man while he begged for his life, called for his mother, and called the one kneeling ‘sir’ as he repeatedly said: “I Can’t Breathe”. They killed him, casually, like something done on the daily, like putting your hand in your pocket and with the air of total assurance that their actions were justified and their consciences clear. Our country continues to mourn and over several days continuously burned, but like the mythical Phoenix, from the ashes we will emerge brighter, stronger and fiercer with a sense of purpose. A week later, the administration spoke of domination, meted out tear gas, flash bang grenades, and trafficked in hypocrisy, but none of that will change the country’s focus. As John Lennon once said — Nobody told me there’d be days like these[…]strange days indeed[…]most peculiar, mama.
