When anger overrides fear

Protesting during a pandemic represents a toxic combination with a potentially damaging impact for the society as a whole. However, the not even vaguely veiled dangers of CORONA contamination was literally trampled by the righteous anger tornados stirred by the knee on the neck murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (May 25, 2020). The video showing Floyd’s last minutes struggle to breathe under the weight of former police officer Derek Chauvin went viral because it deeply touched on our emotions. This preventable death represents another incident where black citizens are overly-subdued by white police officers in the US, adding one more case to the already long history of unresolved issues. Upon seeing such injustice emotions got on fire and released a dynamite-like explosion of reactions. The wildly protesters went out of their way to make themselves heard and use this momentum to express their rage hoping to change something in the justice system. But as anger turned blind, more damage and suffering was inflicted, at least for the moment (i.e., as police or random cars were broken, buildings and stores were set on fire, protesters and police officers were injured, and non-trivial conditions for the flourishing of CORONA’s up-spiral ascent were created).    
      

Authorities could not oppose the protests, and faintly tried to remind citizens about face-masks and social distancing practices. Somehow remote from the mob, a CNN image depicted “A woman wearing a mask protests near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver” as mindful of such ideals. But in the background of the “I can’t breathe” T-shirt woman a large mass of unmindful protesters were not socially distancing and countless other clashes were recorder throughout the US. The crude reality is that when people are enraged it seems improbable to regulate their behaviors by appealing to their rationality or by reminding them of an invisible viral threat. As unfair as George Floyd’s death was, it is likely to cause more damage and death on the short term before it might contribute to the justice system on the long term. Besides the direct damage inflicted to human lives and properties, one additional reason is caused by CORONA’s indifference for how and why her spread is facilitated. Consequently, in two weeks we might see a rise in US infected cases, and in a month more than one additional black coffin conducted to the grave. However, this potentially larger damage prompted by the many individual decisions to take part in the protest could have been prevented if only the righteous anger would have been directed in a different way. But I must admit this is a really, truly hard and difficult to achieve task for the untamed human nature.

O the surface it might seem a sharp contrast between deciding to willingly keep one’s knee on someone’s neck for 8’46” and deciding to rightfully express one’s anger for such an appalling act while discounting the invisible no-death-threat-for-today carried out by a virus. But that’s only on the surface – as one action seem to lead directly to suffering and death of another human being, while the other seem to lead indirectly to similar results for oneself and others, but this time through CORONA’s agency. However, the I-can’t-help-it-but-rightfully-protest attitude, although not likely to incur a comparable degree of accountability, might toxically interact with the pandemic and contribute to the exponential growth of the death toll in the US. But powerful anger overrides fear, and instead of protecting black and white lives in the long term, protesters used the momentum to underline their revolt. In other words, they disregarded the invisible risks and went on for to punish the visible one. Only in one month’s time the protesters, the doctors, and we all would be able to estimate how wise that decision was.