There are so many dispiriting stories in the news that at times I despair and other times I feel like opening the window and screaming “I’m mad as hell I can’t take it anymore.”
Other times I just feel despair. Anger takes energy and I can only muster so much. I experience a helpless feeling when I follow one news story after another about what is happening to this country.
I’m not even talking about the top of the page stories like those in the news about continued mass shootings, the America First Caucus, seeing but not reading the lead story in HuffPost, “Senior Oath Keeper Official Brags They Have ‘Active-Duty’ Law Enforcement Members” (right), and the growing fear that the GOP can win the House and control of the Senate in 2022.
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I am talking about the drip-drip-drip effect of below the fold stories.
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Sometimes it’s an innocuous paragraph in a story that gets to me like this from the NY Times article, “‘God Knows What’s Going to Happen’: Minneapolis Braces for Verdict in Floyd’s Death — Businesses boarded up and residents held their breath, fearing a repeat of last year’s unrest if the jury brings back a decision that the public sees as unjust.”
All along Lake Street last week, as new curfews were imposed by city authorities in the aftermath of Mr. Wright’s killing, there was a persistent hum of power drills. Shopkeepers were busy putting up plywood boards at cellphone stores and furniture shops; at Quruxlow, an African restaurant; at Mercado Central, a Latino market; and at Hook Fish & Chicken, a restaurant across the street from the Uptown Pawn Shop.
The original title I thought of for this diary was just “We’ve become a plywood nation.” I even went to Getty Images to make a collage for my illustration. Then I decided just to use stacks of plywood for a background.
The next story I looked was this article. I watched the video: “Cops Tackled a Grandma With Dementia Picking Flowers, Bodycam Footage Shows.”
A 73-year-old grandmother of nine was picking wildflowers on the side of the road in Loveland, Colorado, last summer when a local cop got out of his patrol vehicle and told her to stop—beginning a police encounter that ultimately left her with broken bones, bruised, and traumatized.
Loveland Police Officer Austin Hopp had been driving behind Karen Garner with his overhead lights on because she was accused of shoplifting from a nearby Walmart. But Garner did not appear to notice, according to body camera footage published by Garner’s attorney Wednesday.
Then I read “CNN Producer Was Reportedly Asked ‘Do You Speak English?’ In Violent Arrest At Protest — Journalists have been harassed and assaulted by police at Minnesota protests over Daunte Wright’s killing, an attorney said in a letter to the governor.”
The fact that there are police who are so prone to violence, in fact that according to reports there are reports some of them are helping to train far right groups, is bad enough. It makes sense that the cops in this story attack journalists makes sense. After all Trump has them brainwashed to see reporters as the enemy.
What got to me in the HuffPost story was the question asked of an Asian-American reporter in the title:
Again we have the influence of Donald Trump who has single-handedly demonized Asian-Americans and led to many of them being not only harassed but being violently attacked. Before Trump the initials DWB prompted a Wikipedia page because of endemic racial profiling in policing. Now because of Trump doing anything anywhere while being Asian put you at risk of assault by anybody if you look even slightly Asian.
I feel like I am being ping-ponged back and forth between sadness and anger.
