On Monday, George Floyd was murdered. The officer who facilitated George’s early exit knelt on his neck for 8 minutes while the man told officers, “I can’t breathe.” When they were done, George was done breathing forever.

Just two or three weeks before this, a bunch of heavily armed white men entered the state capitol building in Michigan without incident. Nobody challenged, nobody dead, nothing but the joy of white privilege.

A few years ago, Native Americans from the Dakotas were forcibly removed from protesting, so economic interests were allowed to go forward unimpeded by the people who had concerns about how their lands were being used. The powers that rule are allowed to bask in their white privilege.

I come from white privilege and cannot begin to understand the sense of what people of color in the United States must live with and fear. Maybe the threat of COVID-19 crashing into our lives gives us the briefest peeks into the tension of what it’s like to be hunted by an invisible enemy. The difference to people of color is that the enemy is hiding amongst all of us white people, is ever-present, and has followed them their entire lives.

America is not ironing out some kinks in the fabric of democracy on the rough road to freedom; we are nuking the highway to happiness with our incredible stupidity regarding the racism that runs deep in the bones of the republic.

Humanity shut down the globe to try to save itself from a virus; I think it’s time for America to shut itself down again until we find the vaccine for racism. This toxic hate is being propagated from the President of our country on down. Just look at the very top left headline on Drudge Report today: Trump retweets a video saying, “The Only Good Democrat is a DEAD Democrat.”

There can be no mincing those words, there is no apology that can be offered when a person in power makes suggestions for a “Good” American to make dead the bad ones. There’s a ripple effect in this type of messaging that if you are hostile to people you see as invaders such as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and they fit the description of the “Bad” ones, then they become the enemy. American soldiers are taught to kill the enemy using this psychology, and now we have the top leader of our military identifying enemies every day, except they are fellow Americans.

The fake news media is the enemy, Hillary is the enemy, science is the enemy, China is the enemy, social media is the enemy, Amazon is the enemy, our allies in Europe are enemies, and now if you identify as a Democrat, you are the enemy.

We are a killer virus where hate of the other is the molecule that infects our sick minds. Sad, but there is likely no cure, no vaccine, no hope that the rage that is being propagated by the leader of the United States is going to just go away.

There are no hopes and prayers and no apology that will bring George Floyd back to life. All of us white people are complicit in George’s death because we don’t hold anyone accountable. We’d better hope that the people of color on this planet don’t see the need to put their knees on our necks until we are pleading for our lives with, “I can’t breathe.”