Photo credit: Tea Krulos
I could breath, even with my asthma. George Floyd and Eric Garner couldn’t, and can’t, ever again. Perhaps in metaphor and memory. I can walk and shout. Were their ghosts inhaling and exhaling with this march, shouting to the heavens? I CAN’T BREATHE!
So now, who listens? Who acts? Saturday, be-masked as were virtually each in the hundreds, I threw a bit of caution to the winds of Michigan, our Great Lake.
I’ve marched in plenty of protest marches, most acutely for the wrongful deaths or murders of black people at policemen’s hands. I admit I hadn’t yet for this amazingly powerful new (and ancient) cause, until Saturday, partly being in my 60s and with asthma, a prime candidate for a bad COVID case. I’m allergic, to all the Humane Society cats I’ve owned since the 1980s.
But imagine a Humane Society for black people, and policeman finally enlightened, not allowing their biases to curdle into ugly prejudice, even “murder most foul,” to quote Shakespeare via Bob Dylan. Our more recent American poet of the “folks” recently referred to beautiful, heroic, white John Kennedy. But his recent epic ballad and its resonant allusions reach into the inspiration of numerous African American artists who’ve helped him become who he was.
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Martyrs to Madness
Now, we see the Milwaukee police chief say that one of his officers has been “crucified” after he was shot during a night-time protest, when the most troubled and venal of people can act in malice under cover of darkness and others’ righteous anger.
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” a divinely-inspired carpenter (and likely a man of color) once said, after moaning to himself, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Since then, the long, hard slog of social progress has unfolded and backslid, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust, all executed by Christian God-fearing peoples. Our social evolution was urged and foreshadowed by the great ex-slave leader Frederick Douglass, even as they still act like “they know what they do”—since the lynching of “Strange Fruit” on Southern poplar trees, as Billie Holiday sang, since charred Emmett Till, and on and on, as a local priest invoked in his remarks before the huge throng marched headlong north up Lake Drive, Saturday.
Photo credit: Kevin Lynch
A protest sign that was used at Saturday's march on the North Shore.
New and Transformative
We know the fearful carpenter prayed in Gethsemane garden to no apparent avail. But something horribly human and transformative began unfolding when he began walking, with that cross on his back. The new messiah paused to forgive a befriended harlot, and then, hung in the sun, with common thieves. While the thieves simply rotted away on the crosses, the holy upstart was soon buried, so as to not inspire outraged Israelites. That was Pontius Pilate's big mistake, as the radical’s blood stain could not wash fully off his hands.
Indeed, Douglass evoked all this in a speech the pastor quoted, when the black man said of himself, “I spent 10 years praying to no avail, then I started praying with my legs.”
People now, from atheists and Buddhists to Islamists and Calvinistic God-fearers (and, one hopes, some now-enlightened Trump-voting evangelical Christians), are “praying” with their legs, in cities all around the globe. America’s original sin, of its founding onward, came from great fathers who nevertheless bequeathed us slavery, racism and the Electoral College, three deceptively corrosive and now dangerous institutions worth powerful meditation, debate and destruction, to the greatest degree possible, with action, with our legs, our voices, and our votes
Joining the Protest
I’d decided to join a protest that began in Shorewood’s Atwater Park, a place with its glorious beach far below the bluff, a playground in my adolescence. If only Donald Trump, the perpetual adolescent, had been there Saturday today, to sun himself even more orange, on the beach. But would he have missed everybody and everything afoot and astir above? As one protester's red cap declared “Make America Love Again.”
Those hats should be hawked on many street corners, if they aren’t already, of protesting cities here and abroad, and in the small towns of Wisconsin, which delivered the 2016 Electoral College to Donald Trump “... for they know not what they do.”
Yes, on street corners. Buying on the Information Highway might be too dangerous for some people, especially the poorest and darkest of us who might have a cell phone on the street where they live, but are often too busy looking over their shoulders, for encroaching police. Because the black man may be shot for holding a cell phone; they’ll say they thought it was a gun, as they've done more than once, to black men. On the street where they live, where they die.
Could the answer be as simple as making America “love again"? Could John Lennon, another martyr to madness, have been right?
I think John knew the carpenter’s golden words: “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and those following, “But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” as Matthew 5:44 recounts.
Hard Time Hating
I have had a hard time hating anyone in my life, Hitler is too alien, even though I've read and seen much of him and his deeds, read parts of his book, of which I own a copy once sold to support refugee children fleeing the Holocaust. I don’t harbor hate Donald Trump. I pity him and, if at times I despise him from my heart’s depths, the object is a betraying enemy of my democracy, our nation.
I pray (as much from childhood habit) for our nation and our people and for myself, and sometimes, fleetingly for Donald Trump, inspired by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. He is the fallen American angel, embodied, inhabited, an utterly bedeviled soul.
I’ve also done a number of satirical drawings over the years, including spoofs of Scott Walker and Donald Trump. Yet satire is not hatred. I've done satirical drawings of people I’ve admired, including a wonderfully introspective senior high English teacher, Maurice Mohr, S.J. They are always efforts at the leavening and healing of, if at times bitter, humor’s grace—even if cruel wit can twist the knife as well.
Homemade Signs
My homemade protest sign juxtaposed the graphic images that bedevil us (wrestling with our better angels in a mighty chaotic flapping). At the top was Garner, gasping “I Can’t Breath!” in a policeman’s choke hold in summer of 2014, and below, the photo image of Floyd, which may remain branded on our souls—those three words, a contraction that signifies death. And yet, we reach perhaps a transformative moment, with a transfixing martyr, a somewhat Christ-inspired person, as the word says?
And because I didn't have much sturdy poster-board of left, I plastered the heart-wrenching print-out images of Eric and George on the back of a sign I’d made for a previous protest against police killings of black men. On that backside remains my comical depiction of Donald Trump as a tree stump, and the slogan: “Save our lives and Dump the Stump!” with duct tape running up sign’s gut attaching my trusty and now rusty yardstick. And that backside got a goodly handful of affirmative comments, during this march and a couple cell phone snaps.
Because they know Donald Trump is the flip side of this dark and deadly coin, with the low-relief imprint: two dying black men and their police murderers as “tails” and Trump as “heads.” Of course, if you can imagine, those poor men and a receding landscape of other bodies, as young as Tamir Rice, 13. The tails are tales, in truth. And we have fate in our hands with the coin in the air. And of course, what else might the gleaming coin signify?
Which leads me to the common football tradition of deciding who gets the ball first, from the referee's coin flip. Many know that Milwaukee native Colin Kaepernick— a pro quarterback in limbo who destroyed the Green Bay Packers in a few games not long ago—has been barred from any team’s ball since the NFL owners apparently blackballed him, when he took a knee during a personal protest of police violence and racism a few years ago. He knew he was risking his career even, as it had floundered a bit. Trump infamously called him and other NFL player protesters, "sons of bitches."
Down on One Knee
Our great throng halted at the intersection of Silver Spring Drive and Marlborough, the beginning of Whitefish Bay’s business district. The protest crowd was signaled to go down on one knee, in the mode of, as the sentiment and occasion call for, prayer, honor or dissent. Or solidarity. Many raised their fists.
Then, the quiet wordless eloquence of that athlete’s bodily gesture of firm, resolved repose came back to me and, in the moment, I was most deeply moved by this march. And there—as a young black woman testified briefly—resounded profound emotions, in my memory and heart, of fears, losses and hopes. Someone we know once said “keep hope alive.” Football is a commonly noted as metaphor for war, warriors fighting to gain ground, the Western and Eastern fronts, or our Civil War’s bloody North-South fields.
But the game is more, a metaphor for dance and music—ensemble and solo—and the rhythmic feel, movement and sound of powerful breathing, conquering our fears and demons, with skill, artistry, teamwork, and courage. A great gridiron leader and team keep going when the loss seems assured but with that shred of hope, the last seconds, until the game is won, or lost.
Could football, that oft-and justly reviled sport, redeem itself in ways dearly needed? Could a violent sport of masses of all classes, help saves us, if we understand what Colin Kaepernick and many others knelt for? The freedom of dissent, of expression, of the press, and of hope, and the freedom to love?
Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers recently said, “A few years ago we were criticized for locking arms in solidarity before the game. It has NEVER been about an anthem or a flag. Not then. Not now. Listen with an open heart, let’s educate ourselves, and then turn word and thought into action.”
Perhaps, too, I hear my dead father speaking (or is he shouting?), the quarterback of a remarkable Two Rivers High School team in 1946 and 1947. Also a die-hard Packer fan and liberal. So the sport’s in my blood. The solidarity, too.
But blood is on the doorstep, America. Black people’s blood, bled red. How do we respond when we rise from that knee on the ground?
Kevin Lynch is former staff arts reporter for The Milwaukee Journal and Madison’s Capital Times and has written for Down Beat, The Village Voice, New Art Examiner, American Record Guide and nodepression.com.
For more of our coverage of the protests occurring across Milwaukee, click here.
