Editor’s note: This commentary is by John McCormick, of Bristol, who has a 30-year background working with NGOs in Washington, D.C., where he also volunteered for homelessness organizations.
Sunrise this morning assured life will go on for another day. It shone bright on our sad, troubled, ill, pained, sorrowful and nervous America.
We are all facing four of the most challenging and frightening events any of us have ever endured. A global pandemic remains unchecked, a collapsed economy with Depression-era unemployment, lost wealth of 99% of Americans and social unrest, the likes of which we have not witnessed since the Civil War, sparked by the gruesome evidence of a nation divided by two unrelated systems of social justice.
How to write this next Reconstruction Act?
A splintered and deeply partisan and dysfunctional Congress is where we turn to pick up the pieces. The irony of that political necessity is the role and low public support of the White House to determine how America prioritizes the many broken parts we must quickly repair.
I look to our children, our millennials, sometimes labeled lazy, pampered snowflakes. They stood up and braved every kind of threat (their health and safety) to march for two weeks with each other, and others of all ages, races and political stripe, to shout to us seniors that the future belongs to them, as frightening as that may be. Their clear demand was universal: no peace without justice. Their image of the murdered George Floyd, at the hands and knees of four Minneapolis police, was the catalyst that moved them to face the police barricades and batons and make the rest of us face the racism, inequity and injustice they are renouncing and vow to end. They will determine how America repairs itself and once again regain respect across the globe.
June 6, 1944, witnessed American soldiers jumping from the landing crafts to face the Nazi German machine gunners. Thousands never reached the beach head but they found the absolute courage and will to force the enemy back. Our brave soldiers and all who aided the war effort are remembered as the greatest generation of the 20th century.
We are now witnessing the unfolding of this century’s next greatest generation. Our children will earn that title each time their multi-racial marches take to the streets with demands for social justice. Yes, recent police brutality and wanton killing of African American men and women was the spark. But, history is the underlying cause of their anger and demands. Since 1621 we have tolerated and legislated two classes of Americans.
The Rev. Al Sharpton eulogized victim George Floyd as the emblem of an America awakening to the raw fact of continuing racism that smolders (smothers) through neighborhoods and within individuals who suffer the wrongs, indignity and denied promise of a better life because that knee on the neck of George Floyd is on their necks as well. Economic injustice, second class citizenship, a legacy of slavery, lynchings and denial of employment opportunities, job promotions, equal pay and all sorts of economic and social abuse have held them back but not down.
The Rev. Martin Luther King and hundreds of thousands marched repeatedly towards police dogs and batons to demand respect and equal rights. Many marches led to killings at the hands of those who hold that America is a white Christian nation and will remain so. America has taken steps to right some of those wrongs even if it has yet to come to terms with the totality of their fundamental demands.
Now, youth of all races, in every metropolitan city and state are telling us this injustice will come to an end. They will design their future through civic activism starting at the ballot box, carrying their demands into state legislatures, governors’ mansions, city councils, school boards, the Congress and the White House. Rev. Sharpton, through decades of demanding human rights, sees, for the first time, hope in the millions of white faces demonstrating.
How they will achieve their objectives to fix the four crises will require more of them than any generation has faced in our nation’s history. Their education and professional objectives have either ended or turned into online exams. Not all college and university students will have the means to return. One estimate cited many thousands of schools will not reopen. A threat of a second and continuing wave of Covid-19 and collapse of middle and low income family economies will determine that outcome. Regardless, they have command of the most powerful tool, in our lifetime, to organize, communicate, support and direct each other through the internet and social media. They are aware of the shallow and self-serving fabric of America’s politics and are not afraid to speak out against half-hearted and greed-oriented proposals and reconstruction plans.
Those brave marchers are not anarchists. They are our children. They carry the mantle of our nation.
