We attended a Black Lives Matter demonstration here in Valencia today. Part of it involved kneeling in silence for nine minutes in honor of George Floyd. Try it. Try kneeling in one place for nine minutes; maybe raise a fist in solidarity. At the end of nine minutes, you’ll be in agony. Your knee will hurt, your shoulder will ache. After a certain age your back will hurt too. For me, it was the longest nine minutes I’ve experienced in some time.

If someone was making you do it it’d be called a “stress position.”

Now imagine being laid out on the ground with your hands cuffed behind you while somebody else’s knee was on your neck, two other guys kneeling on you too, while you struggle for air and feel the life drain out of you.

Nine minutes. It must have been interminable.

This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t “overpolicing.” This was murder.

To be in another country, protesting such an event back in my own country, made me feel deeply ashamed. Ashamed that for so many of my countrymen this was no big deal. Ashamed that for 400 years we’ve abused fellow human beings because of the color of their skin. Ashamed that for 155 years we failed to give them their full value as citizens even after we ceased to enslave them. Ashamed that for 55 years we have held them as second-class citizens even after the end of Jim Crow. Ashamed that our government feels free to kill them for selling loose cigarettes, for jogging, for sleeping in their own bed, for passing, probably unwittingly, a phony 20 dollar bill, for just trying to get home from work.

I don’t think we get to call ourselves “the shining city on the hill,” if we ever really had that right.

There never seems to be any real consequence, unless someone has a camera in hand and can get the video out to the world. We know of the incidents that we’ve seen; how many have we not seen, where the authorities got away “clean?”

Nine minutes. Nine minutes in which a black man was shown just how much he was valued in white society. Nine minutes where four white men got to feel their power over someone they regarded as less value. Nine minutes where it didn’t occur to any of them that this might be a problem, even though they knew they were being filmed.

Nine minutes that says so much about our society, all of it ugly.