“Breath is sanctified, breath is sacred. You don’t have the right to take God’s breath out of anybody.” ~ Reverend Al Sharpton
George was just George. He was no saint. He lived loosely and unwisely in the first part of his life. He had drug convictions and pleaded guilty to armed robbery, for which he spent time in prison.
George Floyd was far from perfect but, you see, he knew it, and he wanted to change. His friends and family say he was trying hard to take back control. He looked ahead at his future and envisioned a life that was clean and good.
A police officer’s knee on his neck robbed him of that dream. He became another black man killed by another police officer.
And yet.
This time it’s different.
Floyd was murdered on May 25. Today, well into June, people are still protesting, marching, and demanding justice and reform. They’re chanting, “Black Lives Matter” and “no justice, no peace” in Minnesota, where he was murdered, and in every part of the country from Washington DC to Chicago, to Utah, to Los Angeles and here in Hawaii. People are marching in his name in London, Sydney, Nairobi, China, Iran– heck, everywhere in the world.
It feels different this time, doesn’t it?
Look, by now we’re all too familiar with the drill. A black man or woman is murdered by police. There’s the initial outrage, grief, and professed horror and remorse. There may be protests, violence, marches, and calls for justice.
But very soon after, the victim is murdered again. I’m talking about the assassination of the victim’s character– the excavation of past discretions and the rotten game of “blame the victim.”
Conservative flamethrower Candace Owen blasted Floyd’s character, President Trump, instead of trying to calm the nation, joined in the trashing.
These ugly voices blare every time a black person is a victim– Eric Garner was breaking the law, they cry. Ahmaud Arbery was trying to rob a construction site, they claim. So-and-so was resisting arrest/had a criminal record/was pointing a weapon (hey, we didn’t know it was a toy!).
And on and on.
But George Floyd broke something. Maybe because we were in pandemic lockdown and so many of us watched his agonizing final moments on earth. We all heard him moan and plead for breath. We heard him cry for his mama. We all saw the casual, arrogant brutality of Derek Chauvin, hand in his pocket, the confident look on his face signaling he knew he’d get away with it.
We’ve finally had enough. And whether you believe in God, or a god, or many gods, or none at all, you know deep down that there had to be a purpose to George Floyd’s life and death.
As the Rev. Al Sharpton said, God uses unlikely people to carry out his will.
“If George Floyd had been an Ivy League school graduate,” Sharpton said in a fiery and moving eulogy, “and one of these ones with a long title, we would have been accused of reacting to his prominence.
“If he’d been a multimillionaire, they would have said that we were reacting to his wealth.
“If he had been a famous athlete, as he was on the trajectory to be, we’d have said we were reacting to his fame.
“But God took an ordinary brother from the third ward, from the housing projects, that nobody thought much about but those that knew him and loved him.
“He took the rejected stone, the stone that the builder rejected. They rejected him for jobs. They rejected him for positions. They rejected him to play certain teams. God took the rejected stone and made him the cornerstone of a movement that’s going to change the whole wide world.
God chose an ordinary man. He wasn’t perfect. He was no saint. His name was George Floyd.
And George Floyd is changing the world.