A Thoughtful Perspective on the Death of George Floyd

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In writing, the story often begins en medias res, or in the middle of things. Right at the very moment when everything is about to change, and the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. In the case of the story of George Floyd, we might start the story exactly there. In the middle of things, or right at the moment that everything for George Floyd is about to change. When George Floyd handed the cashier his counterfeit $20 bill, he had no idea of the gravity of his decision. The gist of my point is that all stories naturally have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in order to understand how the story unfolds, and why things happen the way that they do, in order to have a perspective on the events, we need to have all of the parts that are important to it in order to fully grasp it. We start with George Floyd in the middle of a transaction that changes his life forever. But there is more to this story than just that one moment that set the course of events into motion that tragically ended his life. The next line in the story might go something like this. It wasn't the first time George had made similar decisions. Life was never easy for him. Every day was a struggle, and all George could think of was the next moment. The next fix. The next meal. And they were never really bad things that he did. Not in his mind. He knew he might get caught. It was a risk he was willing to take. Maybe he'd spend a night or two in jail. But it was of little consequence. Just part of the game. And just like he had so many times before, he'd get through it. No harm, no foul. Just another day at the office in the life of George Floyd. You see, what happened to George Floyd was a very tragic thing. Even for his worst actions, there is no justifying what became his ultimate punishment for any of them. But they were still actions that ultimately lead to the worst of possible outcomes. His decisions, and his actions set the wheels in motion for what would come next. Like all stories, how it ends starts with how it begins, and all of the things that lead us to the ending. Every thing in the beginning, the middle, and the end bring us to the final chapter. And all of the parts leading to the end are important to accept that despite a tragic ending, we can still put the pieces together and have a better understanding, a better perspective as to how we got there. In the story of George Floyd I think many of us have skipped to the middle and the end, but missed the beginning. The tragedy is not necessarily that on that fateful day when Floyd and Chauvin's paths crossed something very bad happened. The tragedy is how those paths got crossed in the first place. We need to clearly understand that both actors in this story made very poor decisions, and both have a role in how their stories ended. George Floyd was a criminal, and Chauvin was an irresponsible cop. Had George Floyd lead a law-abiding life, Chauvin and Floyd's paths never would have crossed. George Floyd would still be alive and Chauvin would still likely be policing the streets. Perhaps Chauvin's story would still have happened. Just on a different day, and with a different criminal. But Floyd's outcome is nearly certainly different had he chose a different path. This is not a story about racism. This is not a story about police brutality. This is a story about an interaction between a criminal and a bad cop that went terribly wrong. And I think that is the perspective on this story that needs more of our attention than the one I think has gotten all of the attention, and the one we have wrongly focused on.