Will Progress Be Fast Tracked This Time?

by Don Hall

Decades of inequality. A viral pandemic. Government intervenes with economic shutdown to contain the virus. Sudden massive unemployment. Riots. Protests. Authoritarian response.

The pattern is disturbingly familiar.

It happened in this exact order in:

The 1340s in England after the Black Death resulting in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

In 1349 Jewish communities were faced with conspiracy theories that stated the plague was caused by Jewish immigrants. The Jews of Starusbourg were offered a choice between conversion and death. Those who refused to convert were burned alive.

The recurrence of the bubonic plague resulted in revolutionary-like conflicts between the British colonizers and their subjects from South Africa to India.

1907 and 1916 polio epidemics resulted in rioting throughout New York.

In 19th-century Europe, cholera riots were frequent, from St. Petersburg in 1831 to Donetsk in 1892. In North America, smallpox quarantines led mobs to burn down hospitals and police stations. The residents of Marblehead, near Boston, twice rioted against smallpox inoculation, in 1730 and 1773.

More recently, in 1968, the Hong Kong flu caused much of the same pressure on existing tensions (I was surprised to read that Woodstock was considered a ‘super spreader’ event) resulting in a remarkably similar pattern: Decades of inequality. A viral pandemic. Government intervenes with economic shutdown to contain the virus. Sudden massive unemployment. Riots. Protests. Authoritarian response.

I’ve heard everyone from President Obama to the new Social Justice oriented New York Times Op-Ed editor that there is something different about things this time. I wonder exactly how this is different. History is the context for the present and history says it is almost identical to what has come before.

This is not to say that, in each case, the forward march toward human progress has been unaffected. It looks, from the vantage of human history, like each pandemic/shutdown/protest results in a two steps forward/one step back circumstance. Using 1968 as a perfect model, the resulting Civil Rights Act was passed followed by “Law and Order” presidential candidate Richard Nixon sweeping the election definitively.

*He drinks a Whiskey drink, he drinks a Vodka drink
He drinks a Lager drink, he drinks a Cider drink
He sings the songs that remind him of the good times
He sings the songs that remind him of the best times
(Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy)

I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down,…*

I love this idea. Life is about loss, for certain. We lose jobs, loved ones, money, possessions, friendships. The longer you live, the more you lose. It’s a universal truth for every living being.

Aside from loss (and the inevitability of mortality) the only common truth in life is that you will get knocked down again and again. It is the getting back up that takes guts and moxie. Like Rocky Balboa (who couldn’t box as well as almost any of his opponents but, man, that fucker could take a punch, get knocked on his ass, and get back up for more punishment) the Ones who inspire are the Ones who (as the Japanese proverb tells us) ‘fall down seven times, get up eight.’

There’s something absolutely breathtaking in the bold resolve of black Americans this week. Something undeniably Chumbawamba Tubthumping about the tenacity to live through such poverty (for most), acrimony from bigots (for all), and such dismissal from the host of our leadership and still get the fuck back up and demand better.

Even those black Americans who choose not to participate in the #BlackLivesMatter protests (and there are certainly more of them sitting it out than those on the streets) the decision to take the hits and keep working, keep feeding their families, voting despite the obstacles is a sight to behold.

On a larger view, the economic inequality resulting in a Jeff Bezos trillionaire situation while the vast unwashed struggle to have even enough in their savings to weather a $400.00 emergency requires Rocky-like fortitude.

The hugeness of this current revolt is made up of many participants: those protesting police murders, those protesting Donald Trump, those whose hopes were pinned on Democratic Socialism and Bernie Sanders, those who just lost their jobs and need something to do that answers the unformed rage at the unfairness of it all.

It makes sense to position this as somehow different or better or bound for more movement. The protesters in 1968 positioned their revolt as more enlightened, more righteous, than previous examples. That’s the nature of hope. That this time the result will be the lynchpin moment of massive change.

Decades of inequality. A viral pandemic. Government intervenes with economic shutdown to contain the virus. Sudden massive unemployment. Riots. Protests. Authoritarian response.

My supposition is that it can be different or better or resulting in more sweeping changes but only in the follow-up to the initial volley of thousands in the streets. 

I see (perhaps because I’m looking for them) opportunists looking to make bank rather than systemic change. Professor Robin DiAngelo (former student of Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell and author of “White Fragility”) capitalizing on things by first explaining that all white people are racist then offering to help them with that for a fee of $10,000.00 a pop. Mega-corporations using the language of #BlackLivesMatter to greenwash their public relations to appear to show support but, given corporations cannot have virtue to signal, is just another cash-grab for shareholders. A whole bunch of people looking to extend the idea that black Americans should not be murdered by police to include the “Hire Black People” message.

I mean, what the fuck do I know? As a white, heterosexual, man in his fifties with classic liberal values, both ends of the American cultural spectrum have little use for me. I’m fine with that. No victimhood sitting on my shoulder. Acknowledging my privilege and backing off for others to take it is easy because my privilege comes with no power. Getting the Jeff Bezos’s of the world to give up their power has historically been nearly impossible.

Will this recipe for change, spawned on the historical pattern of pandemic/economic fallout/social protest, be the one that truly transforms the American experiment? I hope so. I believe it will rise and fall on the resistance to fracture the message.

Stick to substantial reform of American policing. Historically, this takes a long time. If both previous promises to reform policing and the Reconstruction following the Civil War demonstrate, once the crowd takes their eye off the game, the game gets gamed. Get that done and move on to the next. Multi-tasking major reforms is a guarantee to half-ass all of them. There is huge potential for change once we have enough skin in the game but too many competing interests has historically been met with splits in focus.

Police reform (or defunding or both). Vote out Donald Trump and his GOP enablers. What next? The climate? The military? Public education? Who knows but I believe it requires focus that outrage simply cannot sustain.

No one asked me but if I could offer a direction, I’d say reparations should be the next seemingly impossible historical change in the queue. Beyond the quasi-religious hogwash that paints all white people as evil, the government owes black Americans a financial debt and, as a two trillion dollar response to the pandemic demonstrates, we can pay it.