Today at last they convicted a cop for murder.

In the streets, on the shitlib podcasts, they hooted and hollered in much the same manner that they did when we got rid of Trump.

Now as then, I’m nominally glad but feel no impulse to whoop.

When together we first elected Obama, it was tempting to mark the problem of racism solved and to go back to ignoring it. (Plenty of reactionaries tried to do just that.) That was deeply problematic, because not only was it not solved, but the election of a black man did essentially nothing to improve the lives of average black men anywhere across the country. He was just another politician, whose skin happened to be a little darker.

The broken system remained on its feet. The cops kept killing for the flimsiest of reasons and with total impunity, and abusing their authority in a hundred smaller ways on people of all colors everywhere.

The Minnesota Attorney General, a smart black man named Keith Ellison who was instrumental in convicting Chauvin, counseled caution. Justice was not had here today, he said, because there was no restoration, of the dead man’s life among other things. He allowed that his victory constituted Accountability in one case finally. I agree, and that is worth celebrating.

Ellison went on to say that actual Justice is in the hands of the American people now.

That’s a lie. Not a cynical one perhaps, but wrong even so.

Justice is still officially in the hands of the Justice System, a subset of the System that kills, a Death Cult. A subsystem that might as well have been named by Orwell, or Kafka.

And the overall goals of the System have nothing to do with justice, or even equality, much less liberty.

We remain one nation for now, under a vengeful god, and the flag that represents the nominal republic never dipped to half-staff for George Floyd, or Daunte Wright, or Eric Garner, or Sandra Bland, or thousands of victims whose names we will never know.