Journal of the Plague Year, Cont'd

Sorry about the lack of updates lately; Internet; I'm still alive. Things have
just been, um, interesting, since my last entry here.

I've been staring at the terminal here, wondering where to begin, honestly. Do
I start with the storms? The power (and Internet) outages? The fact that yup,
there's still a pandemic going on, and people seem to have stopped caring? The
fact I've been working double-shifts for two weeks because a coworker lives in
the path of a typhoon?

Nah. Nobody cares.

Let's talk about the... protests.

Last month, uh, how do I put this... George Floyd died. No, that's too passive;
George Floyd was killed. Actually, that's still pretty passive, isn't it? Late
last month a Minneapolis police officer killed a dude named George Floyd.
Consult Wikipedia for the particulars, if you're reading this somewhat
contemporaneously with my writing it, or your current-affairs textbook, if not.

That led to two weeks of protests, marches, and demonstrations. You might have
noticed them, since they sort of spread... worldwide.

Most of the protests were pretty calm and peaceful. Well, the ones around here
were. Other locations had... slightly less-calm protests. More like riots,
really. And in some places the police, national guard, and active-duty military
rather went mad, sigh.

But there were other problems--primarily that alt-right groups used the
protests as an opportunity to try to kick off a race war, sending provocateurs
to instigate violence and property damage, and idiots to set fires.

HUNDREDS of fires.

And then crowds of protesters/rioters were, on multiple occasions, attacking
the fire departments when they tried to respond.

For a couple of days there was effectively no law enforcement in the metro
area. At the height of the troubles the average response time for a 911 call
was something like seven hours. The local governments actually urged people to
form neighborhood watch groups and stand guard around their neighborhods,
remaining vigilant for suspicious activity and ready to fight any fires they
discovered with... garden hoses.

It was probably the most dystopian experience I've ever had.

Buildings were looted two blocks from me. A car was firebombed a block away.
There were random gunshots at all hours of day and night. Cars without license
plates, driven by typically young, typically white men, prowled the streets.

They burned pawn shops and liquor stores. They burned auto-parts stores. They
burned grocery stores, and furniture stores, and clothing stores. They set fire
to a thrift store. They burned down an apartment building that was under
construction. They destroyed a police station with fire.

They set fire to at least one library... and burned Minneapolis' best bookstore
down, as well as one in Saint Paul.

F u c k i n g   m o n s t e r s .

Anyway, I wanted to share one of the weirder experiences of the whole thing,
briefly.

A curfew was imposed for about a week, where I live. Coupled with the pandemic,
and the lawlessness, and the lack of police and everything, this made the
city... an absolute ghost town, at night.

It was incredlbly weird, incredibly surreal, to be sitting in a major city, at
midnight on a weekday, and not hear anything except the gentle rustling of the
breeze through the trees. There were no planes passing overhead, to or from the
international airport, 'cause pandemic. There were no cars on the street. With
the highways closed - did I mention they shut down the interstate highways? -
there wasn't even the distant roar of truck engines, the far-off rumble of a
loud motorcycle. It was easy to believe there was nobody else left out there,
like the beginning of a bad zombie movie. "It's quiet out there... too quiet."

Things have been quiet for a couple of days, now, and probably will remain so,
knock on wood. Things are starting to get back to normal, at least around here.
A lot of neighborhoods fared much, much worse, having lost, for example, all
their grocery stores, or their major employers.

Now Minneapolis wants to abolish its police department, which worries me. I
know a lot of folks in the Tildeverse are strongly 1312, so I feel compelled to
clarify here that I'm not worried about the idea-I'm worried they're going to
rush the whole thing, focused far more on eliminating the police than on what
will replace them.

The thing that really worries me, though, is that the alt-right will look at
the mayhem they caused and learn from the experience... and be even more
terrifying provocateurs the next time this happens.

Oh, did I mention almost none of the protesters over the last two weeks have
been wearing masks or practicing social-distancing?

Stay safe, peeps. It's a mad world we live in.