Well people said the same thing about Trayvon Martin but nothing changed after the protests.
1) There's record unemployment in the US and there's an active pandemic. People are unhappy and the country is a powder keg ready to go off.
2) The footage this time is especially graphic. You can see the officer strangling George Floyd with his knee. You can see the unnervingly satisfied look on his face. You can hear George call out multiple times that he can't breathe. Then, after he stops moving you can watch the officer continue to strangle him for four minutes. You can also see three police officers that stood by and let it happen in the background. There's not much wiggle room here.
And how he is dead. People are rallying, people are protesting. He is still dead. For a bad check.
>When a man yells for his mother, in duress and pain, and she is dead, he is essentially yelling "please God, don't let it happen to me." [0]
I don't know if I'm just so tired and desensitized at this point that the situation didn't register the first time I saw the picture and transcript (I won't watch the video). And I think that's awful.
I think this is a very common story among soldiers who've seen a comrade get killed. People cry out for comfort in their last minutes.
You have forty million people unemployed, many of which overlap directly with the demographics most impacted by wealth inequality and police brutality. It's pretty clear that this is going to be more intense than in 2012.
It was pretty intense at the time.
but that wasn't a campaign year, nor was there a pandemic raging in parallel where at least 100000 people will have died, the majority of them from minorities.
And as a sidenote:
Trump is literally activating terrorist cells in your country -- his tweet was explicitly quoted by this self-ascribed paramilitary goon when coming out with his machinegun to terrorize folks: https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266509747169005569
Was this happening in 2013? Pretty sure it wasn't.
George Floyd was arrested and handcuffed by four real cops, calmly complied with every request recorded on video, and still died pleading for his life because one cop strangled him for no reason and the other three did nothing. It's a perfect storm: you can say "no matter how compliant you are, the police will still kill you if you're not white enough" and pro-blue opinion leaders can't counter you with anything except "but look at the looters".