…There is no way to camouflage this.

May 30^th, 2020, Monday, and Monday night, were simply horrific.

As was June 1^st, 2020.

I watched city after city shatter and smolder.

I watched my beloved Seattle do the same at the hands of (…) 

I watched the flagship Nordstrom store, a building I worked in for years and years, get hedonistically ravaged. Windows broken. Every glass fixture shattered. Leather chairs ripped. Wooden chairs busted. Almost all young white males doing the damage, stealing clothes and jewelry and shoes and anything they could grab.

And when they were, at last, done with the destruction, just for good measure, they broke the sprinkler heads in the ceiling and unleashed a torrent on any salvageable items that remained.

For the fun of it, many of them filmed the footage so we could all see it, and so they could re-watch it themselves afterward, perhaps with a bowl of popcorn and a cold beer.

And that was just one building.

In just one city.

It was heartbreaking to witness. More than heartbreaking. It was traumatic. Sickening. It was a swirl of every horrible emotion you don’t want to feel coming at you at once.

For me, it was as if I was nine again, living an entire year of terror, time-lapsed, compressed into a matter of hours. Like being strapped to a chair in front of a TV and having to watch a snuff film on repeat over and over and over…

It reminded me of the shock I felt reading” The Lord of the Flies” at age nine, and learning how innocent boys, left to their own gruesome devices, can come to adore terror, terror inflicted on someone helpless or inferior, epitomizing the depravity of man’s inhumanity to man.

Hundreds of small businesses, without the muscle of a corporation like Nordstrom, were also savagely looted. (“looted” seems too kind a word.) Many small businesses were basically surviving paycheck to paycheck. Then came the pandemic. Then this.

Equally horrifying was watching the video of a white police officer essentially killing George Floyd while three other cops stood by doing nothing, though at one point, they even joined Derek Chauvin in leveling their entire body weight on a defenseless Floyd.

Black Americans are killed by police at a rate 2 and half times higher than white people. It’s a fact. And it needs to stop.

Nothing can bring back the people whose names are written above this text. They were killed needlessly by others charged to protect them. But let’s not add another name to the list. And let’s not dishonor their memories. Violence only exists to sabotage a message of social justice.

Now more than ever, we need to love, and talk, and listen.  Violence and vandalism are symptomatic of inhumanity, weakness, and depravity.

We need to love.

We need to talk.

We need to listen.

Please.