I've been searching for something hopeful to latch on to in the week since we watched George Floyd dying on a Minneapolis street, handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a policeman's knee.
But each ray of light I could find wound up with a troubling dark side.
I was encouraged when all four officers involved in Floyd's death were immediately fired. That was a bold move by the city's mayor; a response we haven't seen before. But four days passed before the perpetrating officer was arrested and charged with murder _ enough time for cynicism and grief to send angry residents to the streets.
I was optimistic enough to believe that the spread of protests across the country signified a long-overdue national reckoning with the plague of police brutality. But looters and troublemakers hijacked that _ and property losses vied for attention with the injustice of Floyd's death.
I was heartened by the multiracial coalitions of young people in California, many wearing masks and trying to socially distance, as they marched with their "Black Lives Matter" signs _ and horrified by videos and eyewitness accounts of provocateurs methodically breaking windows and setting fires.
The speed and scale of the public outbursts have offered a dizzying kaleidoscope of images of a nation at war with itself. What you believe may dictate what you see. I mostly see crowds of peaceful protesters being determinedly undermined, where others see only hordes of looters stealing things.
We may each parse the protests differently, but we can't say we weren't warned 28 years ago, when the cops got off for beating Rodney King and giant swaths of Los Angeles burned.
And of all the lessons we might take from the carnage this time, the most important may still be the enduring "No Justice, No Peace."
