A salute to George Floyd

A little salute to George Floyd

Like many, I have been trying to make sense of the horrifying and completely unnecessary death of George Floyd over the last week. The visuals, first of the victim in his final moments and then of the protests – sometimes peaceful and other times not – have caused anguish as they rightly should.

America having been my second home from the mid 80s to mid 90s and that too in my younger years. The emotions am going through right now are, therefore, manifold and mixed. Having lived a good part of those years in the American South (North Carolina and Tennessee) and having been witness to the images on TV of a Rodney King being beaten up by policemen in the early 1990s, my mixed emotions are understandable, at least to me. I rejoiced, incredulously though, when Obama got elected President. This was something I believed was near impossible all through his campaign. I truly believed then that America had turned the corner on race relations and the melting pot had indeed thawed and truly integrated. I could sense black Americans palpably more confident and sure of themselves in the years that followed. George Floyd was, therefore, quite a jarring and disturbing awakening, to say the least.

Rodney King, nevertheless, was quite a turning point In the early 90s. In those days well prior to mobile cameras, someone with a camcorder(?) taped the event and put it up for the public to see. Must have taken not just courage but far-sightedness as well! And, I daresay, that one event, the visuals and the optics of it may have yet paved the way for a Obama presidency in little over a decade and a half. Why? How? Images are so powerful for us humans to perceive things deeply and to meditate on them in peace. A whole generation of American youth in their formative years would have taken in those images and used them to shape their own values and beliefs towards society at large and on the question of race. Rodney King did pay a price but thankfully not the ultimate one as Floyd to pave the way for not just Obama but so many leaders of color that we see across America today in varied fields of human endeavor.

Isn't it the harshest irony that in these times when so many of our kind are dead or dying gasping for breath from an unseen force of a virus, a man should die a not so different death at the hands of a fellow human being. In the former, people rush to serve but watch helplessly as the unseen force takes away life. Uncannily and quite unjustifiably, in the latter the men who have vowed to protect and to serve, watched, offering no help!

George Floyd's death will not go in vain. It shall change us all, not just in America but across the world for those who watched those images and its aftermath with horror and with so many unexplainable feelings. America will not be the same again. It shall overcome and it shall heal as it always does and one day it shall rise from all this to be great again! Only that a man named George Floyd, who only a few knew until that momentous day in May, and his ultimate sacrifice may have made it all possible.....