Images of hundreds of people congregating outside the Belfast Ikea store for its reopening last Monday proves that social distancing and lockdown have become abstract concepts for many. Not that I blame Ikea – they did all they could to ensure people adhered to social distancing – but some people won’t be told, and so those so desperate for a flat-pack coffee table may discover that a flat-pack coffin will prove more useful.
Despite thousands of deaths, the tentative steps taken by the government to ease lockdown are viewed by a minority as an excuse to ignore it completely. After nearly three months of sacrifice, we are in danger of squandering all that has been gained by easing restrictions too soon and risking a second wave of the pandemic.
Along with the droves outside Ikea, the good weather brought crowds on to our beaches, with others standing in a narrow alleyway outside a city centre pub in what was laughingly called a ‘beer garden’. Such selfish actions prove that while someday a vaccine for Covid-19 may be found, there’s no such vaccine for stupidity.
Proof that no such vaccine exists at present is the tenure of Donald Trump as US president and Boris Johnson as British prime minister.
This prime minister may go down in history as ‘two months late Boris’, with his ‘test, track and trace’ policy at least two months behind most other countries. As for his idea of a two-week quarantine for those travelling into the UK, this isn’t so much closing the gate after the horse has bolted as closing the gate after the horse has died of old age.
While some broke social-distancing rules for the most trivial of reasons, thousands around the world broke them for the most honourable of reasons as they came together to protest against the killing of a black man, George Floyd.
In the US, the mishandling of the pandemic by President Trump has almost been forgotten after civil unrest erupted across the US following the death of Floyd while being knelt on by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis cop. Distressing video of the event showed Chauvin press his knee into Mr Floyd’s neck for eight minutes 46 seconds, while the prone, handcuffed and defenceless man pleaded, "I can’t breathe", 16 times before going unconscious.
From their transportation – chained and packed like sardines in slave ships – through hundreds of years of being lynched, right up to today, the words ‘I can’t breathe’ continue to be the last of too many black men in America. It was the last thing Eric Garner cried out when he died, pinned to the ground, by New York City police in 2014.
The difference today is cameras on mobile phones mean such killings can’t be hidden but are there for all to see. America is challenged as never before to witness the inherent racism which has existed since the days of slavery through the civil rights marches of the 1960s, the police beating of Rodney King in the 1990s to the all-too-regular police killings of today.
In 2016, when NFL footballer Colin Kaepernick protested against racism in the US by ‘taking a knee’ while the National Anthem was being played, he couldn’t have foreseen that a police officer ‘taking a knee’ on the neck of a black man four years later would set his nation alight.
Never shy of self-praise, Trump boasted he'd "been the best president for black America since Abraham Lincoln" – this despite having ordered the police, days earlier, to beat black protestors from the front of the White House and block the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the same steps on which, in August 1963, Martin Luther King made his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech. Tragically, for the US, King’s dream remains just that, a dream.
The Lincoln Memorial celebrates possibly the USA’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, who, like Trump, was a Republican; but there the resemblance ends.
While Lincoln deployed the US military to fight in the American Civil War which ended slavery, Trump deployed it against protestors demanding the justice, equality and freedom promised after that war’s end.
While denouncing state governors as weak and demanding they "dominate" the protests, Trump himself cowered in a bunker in the bowels of the White House. The irony for the Trump presidency is the wall he’ll be remembered for isn’t the one he promised but failed to complete to keep Mexicans out, but the one he was hastily forced to build around the White House to keep his own people out.
