I can’t breathe

Breathless, George Floyd found neither the air of the respirators nor the help of the medical staff in the face of death, but rather the brutality. He did not die from an unknown microorganism, he died from a virus that attacks American society in its roots, racial discrimination. During the seven minutes he was remembering his mother and begging for his life, he could not imagine that the world would not tolerate one more minute of hate. But the reality that has followed his horrific agony is that of a worldwide, peaceful and firm demonstration against any racist, authoritarian or inhumane excess.

The death in Minneapolis of George Floyd has awakened the world from its lethargy so that leaders can see that there are insurmountable differences between enduring poverty, pain and death, and tolerating injustice and disregard for life. 
The fires, violence and looting in the United States, which recall the worst moments in the history of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, have raged for seven long nights across the country. A radical and exalted minority has been present amidst the cries of a society wounded by the confinement and death of more than 100,000 compatriots and now by the agony of an African-American, victim of a police excess. President Trump has called them terrorists. They are not. Because demonstrating sporadically against power is not a terrorist act. Nor are they anti-fascists, even if they are determined to be, because the shops, the streets, the democratic institutions and the security forces in a free society like the United States are not fascists. Whatever the anti-system may be, the so-called anti-globalisation of a few decades ago, or the radicals among the yellow vests of a few months ago. 

But since the events are very serious at a time of particular weakness of the American society and economy, the violent acts are not the most important of this unfortunate fact. The reaction of the thousands of Americans, whites and other minorities protesting against police violence against African Americans has put the Trump Administration on the ropes after months of erratic fighting against the pandemic and years of polarization. It has now been verbalized in lawsuits and demonstrations in U.S. cities that the political model of confrontation between ideologies and minorities has its days counted. That the discourse of hatred to which Angela Merkel recently referred in a brilliant intervention must be shrunk with legal resources that prevent its expansion in the social networks, which call democratic symbols and criminals fascists to the peaceful demonstrators who have made their appearance in the big cities of Europe and around the world. Not to destroy American democratic society, but to strengthen individual rights and freedoms and fight racial discrimination. 

In the seven minutes that George Floyd was agonizing under the knee of a violent police officer, he might have thought that his end would not be forgotten. But he could hardly have imagined that, in a confined, fearful and poorly led world, his death would wave the flag of justice and democracy on so many grey sidewalks.