A chorus of voices, hijacked

I love my hometown.

I say this as someone who, as a journalist there for 28 years, gave it the back of my hand more than once when it had it coming. Who poked fun at it when it had it coming. Who recognizes that, if it is insular and backward and Hooterville on steroids at times, it also can be generous and visionary and a pretty damn good place to live -- even with streets that occasionally change names mid-stream for no apparent reason.

Part of  the Fort's charm, I always figured.

It's why I moved back here after a decade somewhere else and never left, even though I could have. It's my city. It has a good heart in spite of its sporadic outbreaks of bull-you-know-what. And so it dismays me to see what happened downtown last night, when a peaceful protest over the police lynching of a black man in Minneapolis was hijacked by idiots.

I wasn't there, but from the accounts of those I trust who were and from watching the live feed, there seems to have been two separate things going on. There was the protest, and then there was a riot. And one seems to have had very little to do with the other.

The protest was about the murder of yet another person of color.

The riot was about a bunch of mostly white punks who came downtown not to express outrage at a nation that still can't come to terms with race, but for the express purpose of smashing things on a pleasant late-spring evening.

And so they did. They smashed windows (Who the hell smashes the windows of a JimmyJohn's? Their food isn't that bad) and overturned planters and climbed on top of police cars and got tear-gassed, which is what their objective seems to have been.  If that weren't the case, why did so many of them show up with cartons of milk to lessen the sting?

Car keys, cellphone, wallet, carton of milk. Yep, that's how I always leave the house.

The police, mind you, bear some responsibility for what happened, too. They showed up in full riot gear and gassed a crowd that included children because they were blocking traffic on Clinton, which quickly escalated the situation. The more prudent course would have been simply to re-route traffic around the area until people started drifting away. Eventually they would have, because that's what people do.

Instead, they played right into the hands of the idiots.

The worst thing about all this, and about the similar unrest that's happening in cities all over America now, is we're no longer talking about what happened to George Floyd and the continued erosion of trust between the authorities and Americans of color.

We're talking about windows being smashed. And cities burning. And the President of the United States encouraging the summary execution, without due process, of Americans for stealing microwave ovens and big-screen TVs.

Swipe that Blu-Ray and you'll get the needle in Donny John's America, sonny. Or a bullet.

But I digress.

Which of course is the point, isn't it?

To digress. To get off-topic. To make mayhem the lead story, and thereby discredit the real story.

I don't think the idiots smashing things up downtown last night were trying to do the latter consciously, although some may have been. Certainly there's a growing body of evidence now that there's an organized element out there whose goal is to discredit and obscure and smear by showing up to burn and smash and destroy.

For that element, that's what this is all about. It's about muddying legitimate outrage with faux outrage. It's about trivializing the conversation we need to have because that element considers the conversation a threat.

Which is why the rest of us, in my hometown and elsewhere, need to keep having it.