In the last 72 hours, the tensions of hundreds of years of social inequality and racial injustice finally boiled over, pulling people in from across the country to demonstrate. They are called thugs and rioters by our government and media, while people demonstrating in Libya, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, Egypt, and Tunisia have been referred to as freedom fighters protesting oppressive regimes. Angry Americans reeling from a sudden rise in unemployment (41 million people were laid off or fired over the last eight weeks), along with the continuing blatant murders of black people by white officers, was the spark. Years of harassment, oppression, lack of opportunity, imprisonment, and radical marginalization have created this situation in Minneapolis, New York City, Louisville, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit, Des Moines, Phoenix, Oakland, Portland, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Dallas cars are burning, windows are being smashed, and the National Guard is starting to respond.

I’m watching between 10 and 12 live streams from across the country at any given moment, and things are continuing to devolve as afternoon gives way to evening. We have a president who is antagonizing his own citizens with tweets claiming, “The shooting will start when the looting starts,” and talking of unleashing the dogs on protestors, which is a direct reference to the dogs being unleashed on black Americans back during the civil rights movement. This is not a localized issue, but the news media, by and large, are showing their local areas only without mentioning that this appears to happen simultaneously in many other cities across the country. Maybe they fear that the greater the coverage the more people will join the mayhem so they can be part of a movement, but this also diminishes how the profound breadth of the current events.

Throughout history, pandemics leave great change in their wake and this one appears to be no different. Over the past years, I’ve often written about our shortcomings and how this will lead us to a moment where we’ll have to rethink how we do things. Instead of the selfish and fortunate few trying to change things for the better, it has been left to the mob, and when change happens at the hands of the mob, chaos is the most likely transition to some kind of new ordering of things. For those in control, they can probably be happy with this situation as there is no national leadership channeling the anger into something productive, they are just sitting back and hoping the crowd will run out of fuel. If this leads to martial law, the problems with self-isolation that were brewing will certainly start to boil over as a certain contingency of Americans will seethe in new hatred for those demonstrators who are threatening the very freedom that some believe is tenuous. Maybe we should ask ourselves if we are stoking the fires of civil unrest that start to push some into contemplating civil war.