I was ambling with my wife and heading north on the Avenue
of the Americas a few years ago, shortly before the Trumpage struck, when we
were rattled by a quick-marching, slogan-chanting, straight-backed brigade of
Black Lives Matter youths that pierced the busy sidewalk full of white-knuckled phone-gripping
home-bound work-a-day New Yorkers and visitors, sending us all scattering like geese
into the heavily trafficked roadway. The chant of “No Justice, No Peace” was loud
and crisp and steady, as the stepping of the marchers was loud and crisp and
steady.
Now as I look back, I reckon that they marched as soldiers
march on a parade-ground while in training to become an efficiently operating
cohesive force; at best they successfully appeared that way; and at worst they
completely failed if their mission was to faze, or gather support from a public
that had long since lost the desire to care for anyone beyond its personal
walls, be they constructs of stone, iron, or willfulness.
One can’t be certain, even now, in the age of full-blown
Trump with his minions swaying to the strains of “Rich Lives Matter” that even a cry
of “All Lives Matter” would sound a sweet endnote to these stark and stressful times of
cacophonic disharmony, but it seems to me that the silent, sycophantic, card-carrying counsels in Washington and their vociferous outlying tribes are themselves drilling for something darker even than oil and coal.
I remember hearing a ditty that was sung around Wall Street in the mid-'70s that went like this:
Brezhnev is my leader,
Brezhnev is my boss,
Come the revolution,
We'll all be eatin' borscht.
Roots. Can't live with them, can't live without them.
