USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: Tinderbox times cry out for exceptional leadership
As June begins, the United States faces three intertwined crises: the continuing coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 100,000 lives in the past three months; the resulting economic crisis that has left more than 40 million people unemployed; and now the policing crisis that has triggered the largest wave of urban unrest since the late 1960s.
Each disaster disproportionately harms people of color. Each feeds off the other. The pandemic spawned the economic free fall, and mass protests over the death of George Floyd a week ago in Minneapolis are likely to accelerate the pandemic.
Tinderbox times like these require exceptional leadership. Such leadership is not coming from the White House, where President Donald Trump veers erratically from stilted expressions of sympathy for Floyd’s family to reckless statements that pour more gasoline on the fire.
Nor is it coming from Republicans in Washington who recognize that Trump is unfitness but, with precious few exceptions, remain afraid to break with the president or cross his fervid base of supporters.
Nor is it coming from certain liberal Democratic mayors who have all but opened the door to looters in their cities, or who have failed to weed out bad cops and confront the unions that protect them.
That leaves others to fill the leadership vacuum, and here a quartet from Atlanta is stepping into the void and showing the way:
❚ Listen to U. S. Rep. John Lewis, the ailing 80- year- old icon of the civil rights movement, who told the protesters, “I see you, and I hear you. I know your pain, your rage, your sense of despair and hopelessness. Justice has, indeed, been denied for far too long. Rioting, looting and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit in. Stand up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive. History has proven time and again that nonviolent, peaceful protest is the way to achieve the justice and equality that we all deserve.”
❚ Listen to rapper and activist Michael Render, better known by his stage name Killer Mike. In a speech that LeBron James called “a mandatory listen,” Killer Mike noted that he’s the son of a city police officer and has two cousins in law enforcement. “I got a lot of love and respect for police officers, down to the original eight police officers in Atlanta that, even after becoming police, had to dress in a YMCA because white officers didn’t want to get dressed with n----- s. … It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization. Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize and mobilize.”
❚ Listen to Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who delivered a stern message as CNN’s world headquarters was under siege: “This is not a protest. This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. ... You are disgracing our city. You are disgracing the life of George Floyd and every other person who has been killed in this country. We are better than this. We’re better than this as a city. We are better than this as a country.”
❚ And listen to Erika Shields, the city’s white police chief who waded into a group of protesters to listen to their concerns. “You have a right to be upset, to be scared and to want to yell,” she told them. “I’m standing here because what I saw was my people face to face with this crowd, and everybody’s thinking: ‘ How can we use force to defuse it?’ And I’m not having it. I’m not having that.”
America stands at a perilous moment. At no time since 1968, a year of shocking assassinations and turmoil in the streets, has it felt so much like the wheels are coming off. Yet even as unrest roiled the nation this weekend, the successful SpaceX launch and docking reminded us what the nation is capable of if we don’t tear ourselves apart.
If the country is to pull through this confluence of crises as it did a half- century ago, it needs more voices and examples like the ones coming from Atlanta — and fewer opportunists trying to exploit a terrible situation for personal or political gain.