By G. S. Norwood We live in crazy times. At a time when most of us are just trying to stay safe from the coronavirus pandemic and stay afloat in an unstable economy, we have seen armed counter-protesters turn out to threaten peaceful protesters in a quiet town like Weatherford, Texas. How can this be legal? Protesters and militiamen have died in places like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, due to the presence of heavily armed militias. The President of…
By G. S. Norwood When armed civilians take to the streets, what are they thinking? The news out of Kenosha, Wisconsin, is bad. A 17-year-old boy, armed with an assault rifle, killed two protesters and wounded a third. I wanted to finish up this cycle of protest-related blog posts by trying to answer the question: What are they thinking? Peaceful Protests or Armed Militia? To get to that answer, I’ll recount a conversation I had online with two men who…
By Jan S. Gephardt We were ripe for protests. We should have seen them coming. Some of us undoubtedly did. The COVID-19 pandemic stripped all the systemic problems and weaknesses in our racist, inequitable society bare. They stare us in the face every day of our transformed lives. Every news cycle, the horrors pile up. Cascades of catastrophe An ever-changing number of states show uncontrolled spread of COVID. We’ve recorded more than five million cases of COVID in the USA….