You would think that given the wide publicity surrounding the recent incident where Amy Cooper, a white woman whose dog was off leash in New York’s Central Park, was fired from her job after calling the police and telling them that she feared for her life because Chris Cooper, a black birdwatcher, had told her that the area they were in required dogs to be on leashes, people would be more cautious about calling the police on black men for the most trivial of reasons.
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There have been large demonstrations following the death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground and kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for over five minutes, despite Floyd protesting that he couldn’t breathe and bleeding from his nose. Some of the demonstrations erupted into violence and looting and the police are again accused of over-reacting.
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In the May 11, 2020 issue of the New Yorker, in an article titled How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump, Evan Osnos profiles the wealthy country-club Republicans who live in this enclave in Greenwich, Connecticut, home of the elitist Bush family and their friends, who originally thought of Donald Trump as nouveau riche and utterly gauche and beneath them. They have now been completely converted to him because of how much wealthier he has made them and because he says the racist and misogynist and xenophobic things that they always thought but felt that they could not say out loud because it would reveal to others that their publicly professed socially enlightened values were all a sham.
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A horrifying video has emerged of a black man George Floyd who died in Minneapolis after a police officer pinned him to the ground with his knee on the man’s neck for five minutes, even though the man was saying that he could not breathe and bystanders who recorded the incident said that the man had started bleeding from his nose.

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That excellent radio program This American Life just recently won the first-ever Pulitzer prize for excellence in journalism awarded to a radio program. It is well deserved because it is a truly outstanding program. The show they won the prize for dealt with the terrible plight of the migrants who have been turned away at the US-Mexico border because of the cruelty of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. They rebroadcast that program last week after winning the prize and you can listen to it here. Back in 2005, I wrote to the program offering to nominate them for a prize for their coverage of the terrible treatment meted out to poor people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. You can listen to that program here.
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