Let me put it this way - if you think that cops in general club protestors and shoot out their eyes for sport, you have a wildly skewed view of cops. I live in Russia, with admittedly corrupt cops who do in fact on occasion do violence to actually peaceful protestors, plant evidence, and all kinds of things. And even they don’t do it for mere sport. When I watch the “peaceful protesting” in all the videos coming from the US, it makes me want to laugh in a sad way. You guys have no clue about genuinely bad police. The bad egg is still a thing few and far between where you are.
The real test of whether a person is a fair thinker is whether they will admit when the side they defend goes wrong. I hear nothing from you guys, nothing at all about the black policemen killed by the “peaceful protestors”, the black businessmen and homeowners weeping for their homes and businesses destroyed by the “peaceful protestors”, and the millions of black babies murdered by abortion. Nothing. Silence. Zippo. Zilcho. That’s why your words are so wildly unconvincing. Everybody was with you in condemning the treatment of Floyd. But now you promote a “reform” of the country with no clear conception of form, except perhaps a Lennon-style “Imagine” utopia, of a world with no sin in our own hearts.
The problem is not “systemic racism”. The problem is sin, plain and simple, and sin knows no racial barriers. The whole aim of these “protests” runs against the grain of Orthodox teaching. They are against, not specific people who did specific things, but (speaking only about the best intentions of well-meaning people) against an attitude of the heart (racism). It is a protest that by definition can never end, just as a war on an emotion (terror) can never end. As a result, it means only anarchy. You literally might as well go out with posters denouncing sin. And that’s something you can NEVER effectively fight with protests. If the cop who killed Floyd in what was certainly manslaughter is fully justified in court, you could protest that; it is a definite thing. But you can’t protest the sin in other people’s hearts, nor should you. Our Church teaches us at all points that our concern should be with our own hearts and not with the hearts of others. We can say that specific evils are evil. Killing Floyd was a specific evil. Racism is not. Stealing the crown jewels or raping a woman is specific; envy and lust are not.
Also, statues matter. As a rule, they are longstanding things that people have agreed upon for a long time as something important to remember in history. It is a very weighty thing to pull down any statue; it requires understanding greater than those that erected the statue. It requires being able to parse through both the good and evil in a person’s life and actions, and not only justly weigh them, but have a good answer to the best objections. I see actual statues of Lenin and other Soviet heroes still standing. I say it was right to pull down the ones they did in Moscow in the 1990’s, but it is based on an awful lot of thinking and knowledge. The people in the US doing this now have no such knowledge or thought. They are idiots, useful idiots, and they don’t even rise up to the level of GK’s “splendid dupes” (unlike those who fall for the rhetoric of “systemic racism” and desire to end racism who really do); there is nothing splendid about them. But there IS something splendid about the dupes who hate the evils done to black people by racist whites, and seek to peacefully redress them. They are still duped, and their minds are befuddled, but their hearts are in the right place. Still a good heart with a befuddled mind can lead us to ruin, just as a clear and clever mind with a wicked heart can. It requires a greater willingness to engage in self-criticism if one would be as wise as a serpent, and yet harmless as a dove.
