The National Guard fans out down Pine St on the eighth day of protesting in June. Absolutely shocked we didnt see a similar formation before Trump goons stormed the Capitol building.
The National Guard fans out down Pine St on the eighth day of protesting in June. Absolutely shocked we didn't see a similar formation before Trump goons stormed the Capitol building. RICH SMITH

To be honest with everyone, I have been sitting at this computer for about two hours trying to process the mess that happened today in our nation's capital. But when I try to fix one of my thoughts to a definite idea or position or concept, I find it difficult to provide an analysis that does not just state the obvious. We watched the storming of the US Capitol building in much the same blunt way we watched the murder of George Floyd. It's just so obvious: it's right in front of our noses.

The white officer's knee on a black man's neck has its dumb double in the white nationalist's hand—authorized by leading figures on the right—smashing and trashing a building that serves as one of the leading symbols of our democracy. Some even took selfies with the white police officers assigned to protect the public's sacred property.

This is not how the cops treated Black Lives Matter protesters at all in 2020. Even here in Seattle, police used the kind of terrific force that makes dictators jizz in their pants against people demanding that the police simply treat the lives of black people in the same way they treat the lives of white people.

The tear gas, the sticks, the stun bombs, the roar of the armored trucks, the breaking of heads, the arrests. Day after day. A city supposedly run by the left smashing to pieces the left's democratic call for equal enforcement of the law.


My mind jumps from CHAZ, from the East Precinct, from Cal Anderson Park to the white cop who, only a few hours before a white supremacist threw his feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk, wasn't charged for shooting a black man seven times at close range. The black man is alive but will never walk again. And the worry was that the predictable pro-cop decision would send protesters back to the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump pretty much warned that his men were once again cocked, locked, and ready. The National Guard was expecting thugs and antifa. The real action, however, occurred not in Kenosha but at the heart of American democracy, whose key building is apparently guarded the some of the sleepiest cops in the land.

And so, what can be said about this mess (and I mean mess in the black American sense of "papa don't take no mess") is not at all that surprising or profound. If you watched the events today, you really saw what you saw. To explain it, to break it down to "its very last compound," is just a waste of time. You only needed your own eyes for George Floyd's death. You only need those very same eyes for what went down in D.C. today.