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Where Are Our Heroes?

Bring a Martin Luther King and I will march with him anywhere. All I see now are people taking advantage of a situation.
Protests Against Police Brutality Over Death Of George Floyd Continue In NYC

Last week, New York City suffered an 8 p.m. everyone-off-the streets curfew, the first in 75 years (the COVID lockdown was also concurrently still in effect). Protests continue, with several hundred people Tuesday night closing down streets adjacent to my apartment building. Here’s the view from street level, and the one from 30,000 feet.

Many stores in my part of America’s richest city had already been boarded up; the men putting up the plywood coming in from white working class neighborhoods in nearby Queens said to me they’re grateful for the work post-COVID, “but if I ever have to do this for my own neighborhood some mf is gonna suffer.”

The protesters themselves were about two-thirds white, uniformly in their mid-to-late twenties. People wearing Bernie T-shirts outnumbered those still practicing social distancing by about 6:1. Everyone who would tell me where they lived said Brooklyn but if you live here you would have already guessed that by the piercings, oiled beardsmen, and shaved heads. The black protesters appeared to be joining spontaneously from the surrounding public housing blocks and not mingling. Their chants weren’t the organized ones of the white kids, mostly “f*ck the police” accompanied by gang signs or middle fingers, just rage cleansed of politics. No Bernie shirts.

None of the black protesters would speak to me, but the white protesters wouldn’t stop. They knew media and my notebook drew them like shadows to a lamp. Asked what they wanted, everyone had their lines down (it was justice and peace) but no one really had an answer to how this demonstration would help create those things. What law could Congress pass to fix any of this? After a few suggestions to abolish the police, raising awareness seemed to be the closest anyone could get.

Some apartments in the area have hired private security, beefy guys you usually see checking IDs at night clubs. One hotel employee I know said his five-star place had former SEALS at the door. Two NYPD helicopters were overhead for almost two hours, top cover Baghdad-style, watching the rooftops. Middle class people living nearby are angry and afraid, and such people will defend themselves, and that will be a terrible, terrible thing. It seems leaders on all sides are setting us against each other and we are embracing that as a new normal way of life. When was your last pleasant but intense political discussion with friends?

It was hard to connect the odd collection of impressions from street level with a new theme among the righteous but uneducated on social media. They seem to think burning a Target is the modern equivalent of the American Revolution against the British. I listened to the Hamilton score twice now, and even read the Klassic Komics version of Federalist Papers, and can’t find anywhere the American side whined about the British being too rough. Instead, they understood a revolution meant risking their lives, their honor, and their sacred fortunes. Denied representation under an undemocratic system, they fought.

The Founders took to the streets with none of the protections of the Bill of Rights. It was only after they won they created a Bill of Rights. It came as a package deal, because the Founders wanted to create a society where peaceful change was written into our marrow and so another bloody revolution was something their children would not have to undertake.

Yet the sad desire to convert violent actors into heroes, to claim violence and looting are justified, takes place in the midst of some portion of our society desperately seeking a classic hero to very undemocratically slay the dragon, Donald Trump.

And so America these are your new heroes, people who fraudulently invoke the grace of Dr. King to label riots as lawful protests, looting as reparations. To be fair, most of that labeling is not by the thugs themselves, but by those who elevate them. “Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence,” NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones said. Colin Kaepernick quoted Malcolm X, “Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” 

The Democratic Party of Fairfax, Virginia, tweeted (now deleted but the sentiment is widely shared), “Riots are an integral part of this country’s march towards progress.” Citing the freedom fighters in the streets, former labor secretary Robert Reich just generically proclaimed “Trump’s presidency is over.”

The search for heroes leads down some odd paths. The media met the prospect of the military’s arrival on mixed ground. The lede is Trump has “declared war on the American people” and this will cost him the election, even though 58 percent of voters support the deployment of the military in response to protests, with only 30 percent opposing.

Meanwhile, the web is awash in uninformed fear mongering over martial law, posse comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and whatever else a Wikipedia search churns up—you know, maybe a military coup via martial law would be okay if it gets rid of Trump. It is not an unpopular idea; almost a third of Americans would support a coup. Ex-CIA head Michael Hayden—hah hah—jokingly talked about the idea.

We’ve heard this for years. Upon General Mattis‘ departure, the The New York Times asked, “Who will protect America now?” Hopes have been expressed one of the ex-military men once in the White House, maybe John Kelly or H.R. McMaster, would hero up and assume control. If not directly, then maybe by running the country as the patriot behind the throne.

Politics, and the search for heroes, makes for strange bedfellows. Felon Michael Avenatti was a hero contender for longer than David Bowie’s “just for one day.” Porn star Stormy Daniels, and felon Michael Cohen, too. Along the way James Comey, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Christopher Steele, and James Clapper were all given some hero time, and of course the run by Robert Mueller as Savior-in-Chief. There was the anonymous whistleblower and a handful of State Department drones at the impeachment hearings. Even the virus was given the chance to end this presidency.

The hero-seeking media partnered with every Democratic black candidate of any type or plain white woman who could check boxes (single mom, lesbian, HIV+, veteran, etc). The high point of this low point was reached with AOC and her Squad, whose only real accomplishments have been relentless self-promotion and helping push Nancy Pelosi into an impeachment process that squandered the Blue Wave.

At least most of those who held the hero title for a while were politicians of a sort. But rioters as the new heroes? That’s who is left? Bring a Martin Luther King and I will march with him anywhere. All I see are people finding ways to take advantage of a situation for their own advancement, materially, politically, or just for the clicks.

These are desperate times. No one wants bad cops, and every day America suffers for its original sin of slavery and failure to find repentance. The only answer the country seems to have come up with is to allow rioters to run amuck every few years to let the pressure reset. Pick your favorite: the TV version following Rodney King, the blast from Ferguson, or something old school from the 1970s out of Watts or the Bronx. Apart from letting off political steam to let politicians off the hook, riots are not a vehicle for political change in a democracy. They are the antithesis of democratic change, change by force with no desire for compromise. To claim violence in response to other violence is instead justifiable anger at a systematically bad system only creates more violence. It’s a circle, see?

Was it was only a week ago people said protests against government (specifically COVID restrictions) were wrong and dangerous, we should listen to the authorities, and were glad the cops were out there enforcing social distancing? The heroes then were clerks stocking shelves. In fact, the people I saw at yesterday’s protest looked a lot like the people hissing at me in Whole Foods for not wearing a mask. They likely believe the First Amendment protects their protests but not those of the rednecks at the statehouse. To them every offense is a lynching, every day the apocalypse, every Tweet a blow to democracy, every misunderstanding racism.

Once you understand how shallow and tiresome and hypocritical such views are you will understand the 2016 election, and in about 150 very long days from now, the 2020 election. No heroes, or Russians for that matter, necessary.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.

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