The (Dis)United States of Floyd

For the last several weeks the US has been bookended by two cases that are symptomatic of what is ailing our society and country. For just under a year now the US has had to do some soul searching following the horrific death of George Floyd at the hands of the now former police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin was recently found guilty of all three charges in the death of George Floyd and is now in prison awaiting sentencing. This has bought a measure of relief to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the wider African-American population, especially to those who live in the Minneapolis area. 

The other case that has our country in its tight grip involves Dejywan Floyd, the man who succumbed to road rage and shot and killed the passenger (who happened to be white) of a vehicle that had passed him on the I-95 highway in North Carolina on March 25th. The George Floyd case is representative of the police violence perpetrated against Black men that we have seen far too often. The Chauvin conviction is a small first step to addressing this issue. The Dejywan Floyd is more complicated. The issues at play are the easy access to guns and the phenomenon of road rage that turns normally calm people into violent lunatics. 

Source: https://www.wgal.com

The Dejywan Floyd case has not received the same media attention that the George Floyd case has. And that is understandable given all that is at play in the Chauvin trial. But I think a far more insidious factor is that our country is not really ready to tackle the issue of road rage (we could also make the case about violence against woman since the murder is a male and the victim a female). We have already seen the strong resistance to any form of gun control.  The violence committed against George Floyd was egregious; the violence committed by Dejywan Floyd is harder to pinpoint because it is almost ephemeral, evaporating like the morning dew on a late summer morning after the act was committed. Road rage lasts seconds and dissipates where the violence exhibited by Chauvin lasted longer, was more embedded in his personality and, more importantly, was captured on video. In the Dejywan Floyd case, there were no witnesses to the crime other than the father and children who watched their wife and mother die needlessly. 

Our country has closed the book on Derek Chauvin and justice has been delivered to the aggrieved George Floyd family. Now it is time to turn our attention to another chapter in this most difficult narrative that we are living: road rage violence. Both of the Floyd cases reflect a part of us that we do not want to admit to. In his novel Cousin Bette, the French novelist Honoré de Balzac writes, "Love is the gold, but hate the iron of that mine of emotions that lies buried within us." Thanks to social movements like Black Lives Matter we can dig through our many strata of ignorance, racism, indifference and lack of knowledge and empathy to bring to light important events and issues that must be faced as a nation. There are so many diamonds and minerals that must be examined in their own right; no one diamond shines brighter than the others. We must not forget this. 

Taking de Balzac's quote further, the United States is like a coin; one side is made of gold and the other is made of iron. As we all experience the upheaval of social justice, we should be very concerned with which side shines brightest when we are back on our feet again.