Saving a Life
"We saved a life today.""If the other three police officers that were standing around when George Floyd was murdered had thought about intervening, and stopping their colleague from doing what he was doing, like what we did, George Floyd would be alive today still.""I just want equality for all of us. At the moment, the scales are unfairly balanced and I want things to be fair for my children and my grandchildren."Patrick Hutchinson, Black Briton"I saw a skirmish and someone falling to the ground.""The crowd parted right in front of me. I was in the right place at the right time, and incredibly lucky from that point of view."Dylan Martinez, photographer, Reuters
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| Protester Patrick Hutchinson carries an injured counter-protester to safety, near the Waterloo station at a Black Lives Matterprotest in London on Saturday following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody last month. Photo: Dylan Martinez/Reuters |
"It was right that a good number [of counter-protesters] should have been arrested.""They were violent. They were aggressive towards the police. They were patently racist.""There is nothing that can excuse their behaviour."British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
Drama, in the violence of opposing political and human rights views. The crux of it all, yet another death of a Black man in the United States by a white police officer, caught on video and shared worldwide, eliciting disgust and shame, and leading to massive protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Protests meant to be non-confrontational, violence-averse since they were, after all, protesting violence against a particular group of people. But which themselves have been violent, racist and shameful with thugs making their point through feral brute power.
Out of the protests against police brutality, as it particularly relates to Black lives, came other issues, one of which was the violent upheaval and desecration of national monuments and heroic statues dedicated to historical figures. Demands issued from those calling themselves anti-racist who themselves shouted racist screeds against other groups, that memorials, plaques, street names, statues, building and school identities, be scrapped because they memorialized Britain's colonialist and racist history.
On Saturday, in central London, a scheduled Black Lives Matter protest brought out counter-protesters who set themselves the task of defending those monuments and statues from predation by the BLM crew. And a predictable clash of ideologies took place, with the thugs on either side aiming to do justice to their status as thugs. In the episode where Patrick Hutchinson and his friends moved in to save a white anti-protester and rabble-rouser from extreme physical harm and possibly death, the classical symbolic tug between humanity's good nature and bad nature took place.
And a man who likely decries the demands of Black citizens for equal respect, opportunity and treatment in the society they co-habit, prepared to use force to ensure everyone knew where he stood, found himself saved from a very dismal fate by a member of the very group he despised, risking his own safety to assure his. A tale not too oft told.
Patrick Hutchinson, Black activist, father and grandfather, and his friends who had come out together to rally in support of the demands for fairness and equality for Blacks, in equal measure to the larger white population, saw a white man with a shaved head knocked to the ground, surrounded by BLM protesters prepared to continue beating the man presumably until he no longer stirred, felt moved to step in, hoist him over his shoulder in a fireman's grip, and haul him out of the melee to safety.
"...The guys went in there, they sort of put a little cordon around him to stop him receiving any more physical harm. His life was under threat."
"So I just went under, scooped him up and put him on my shoulders and sort of started marching towards the police with him whilst all the guys were surrounding me and protecting me and the guy I had on my shoulder."
Patrick Hutchinson
Labels: Anti-Protest Groups, Black Lives Matter, Confrontation, London Protests
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 17, 2020
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