Nine Minutes and Twenty-nine Seconds

Nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. What kind of man would press a knee into the neck of another man for so long a period of time and think it is okay? And it isn’t like he did it in his basement. Officer Derek Chauvin did it in broad daylight, on a city street, with people gathered all around. He had no shame. I am a bit surprised Chauvin did not look around foolishly as he kneeled on Floyd’s neck, and say to the onlookers, “What?”

Chauvin is the police. These people – not all of them, but more than you might imagine – suffer from a sense of entitlement that rivals the privilege conquering soldiers have exerted over defenseless villagers for centuries, carrying with it the atrocities that have filled out countless campaigns. 

It is a beastly thing, this misguided sense of power – not imbued by God, but bestowed by men upon men who seemingly have no way of preventing such delusions of self-might from seeping unencumbered by conscience, into their brains. This reckless privilege has spawned a horrific culture of fear, death, and racial animus that is nowhere so pronounced as here in America.

Yet, in many of their minds, these police are simply “heroes”. When challenged, they simply become “misunderstood heroes” – mistreated and under-appreciated. They rarely feel remorse for their actions. Mostly, they feel disdain for what they view as political lynching. In their minds, they assume the posture of sacrificial lambs, and they feel every bit as innocent