Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>]

Hi Felix,

I live just a few blocks from the epicenter of the unrest in Minneapolis, and have for most of my life.  The stores and businesses burnt this week are the ones I shop at every day.  It is a very mixed, diverse, and progressive area.  A medical clinic on my block that serves the local underserved community was targeted by an incendiary device late last night.  Not the grocery store, not the bank, not the coffee shop or the liquor store or the gas station, but the medical clinic, in an isolated attack on a completely empty street.  With no police or authority of any kind around, local residents spotted the device and removed it.

It is obvious that the rhetoric of the far right, which is so fundamental to partisan politics these days, loves the destruction.  There is ample footage of what you could call agents provocateurs, and a lot more evidence on social media.  The evidence of my own eyes has affected me most.  Maybe this is all wishful thinking, but Minnesota is a swing state, and has become a battlefield in more ways than one for dual visions of how the nation and the world should go forward.

Some might say that the whole city should burn down -- not just what already has, but all of it, indeed all cities -- and not just in the US, but in all of Europe as well, even all the world.  My question is what this has to do with George Floyd.  Who does this destruction serve strategically?  The far right likes hollowed-out inner cities, and ethnic fear with boiling hatred.  The family and community of George Floyd are not calling for this.

What is an even worse mind-bender is that the spread of Covid-19 among the protestors will undeniably cause severe suffering.

I am not of the belief that all cities, all universities, and all museums, all hospitals, homes, and grocery stores over the entire planet must be burned to the ground before progress can be made, unity worked for, peace and justice served.  Of course no one listens to me.  🙂

My hope is that what is breaking is the idea that the old ways, business as usual, was working great.  We all have a responsibility to create a new business as usual.  We will all make our choices about how to go about it, time will tell whether humanity does its best or its worst, or something in between.

My personal choice is to help bandage up the wounds of my community and yes, to echo calls for peace with justice.  Maybe this is indefensible and maybe it isn't.  Part of my goal is to try using art to help this process, as in my recent blogs on Leonardo.info about "The Mindful Mona Lisa," and how that painting unifies Leonardo's important messages to humanity today about mindfulness, technology, geologic time, progress, human values, medicine, love, and healing.

Of course I could be wrong about all of this.

Very best regards, with hope for the future,

Max





________________________________
From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2020 5:27 AM
To: nettime-l <nettime-l@mx.kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?


I, like probably most nettimers, I have been observing the fracturing
of the US with increasing horror (knowing that Europe, over the last
70 years, has usualled followed the US, for good and bad). With the
horrific response to Covid-19, things to have now taken an even
darker turn, compounding all the simmering structural violence into
something, well, into what? Approaching civil war? There are certainly
enough heavily-armed militias around who are clamoring for it. Is this
a breaking point, and if so, what exactly is breaking?



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