Going without a mask in private businesses is a civil liberty, but being processed in the courts instead of executed is not. It matters if a mask is the reason you can’t breathe, but not if the reason is a knee on your neck. We champion freedom at all times and everywhere, but NFL players had better not kneel. You can stand outside the governor’s office with machine guns, but holding a sign while black is eminently threatening.

The Karen is not a funny meme, when one understands that being stopped for no reason was a precursor to lynching. Hatred of the police is not unjustified, when your history is one of rarely reaching a courtroom. Rage and destruction is not baffling, when on giving them faith, the courts quickly betray you. The avoidance of a name is not innocent, when that same attitude of mind has sought to scribble out our history.

The last four years are a desperate attempt to go backward in time to the fifties and sixties. To that mythical era of self-correcting free markets built upon a subjugated “other.” It is crude Americanism and an ideal that can’t prevail. Like trying to resuscitate someone long dead.