Pierce: Bearing Witness Forces Us to Act on Our Fundamental Duties to Each Other as Citizens
Bearing Witness Forces Us to Act on Our Fundamental Duties to Each Other as Citizens
We are obligated to witness each other’s suffering, especially when that suffering is brought upon someone under the law.
By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 21, 2021
The second-day story, which is a journalistic requirement when the first-day story is as momentous as the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin was, is the story of two young women. They were caught up in the momentum of the story, one at its beginning and the other at its end. If, as Seamus Heaney told the ages, once in a lifetime hope and history rhyme, it was these two young women who set the poetic meter of this moment in history.
Darnella Frazier was 17 on the day that she stopped outside of Cup Foods and watched Derek Chauvin kill George Floyd for 10 minutes. She took out her cellphone and recorded the images that both engraved the facts of the case into the minds of people around the world and, ultimately, blew up all the easy, moth-eaten alibis used by the defense every time a police officer kills somebody....
As citizens—hell, as human beings—we are obligated to bear witness to each other’s suffering, especially when that suffering is brought upon someone under the law. Ordinarily, any talk of this being a Christian nation makes my skin crawl and my teeth itch. But this civic obligation is at least Christian-adjacent. If there is a law or a practice that causes our fellow citizens to suffer, then we have an affirmative obligation, by virtue of our freedom to do so, to change that law and, if that isn’t enough, to change the people who make the laws. Darnella Frazier made that first step, bravely, and with no thought of reward, but simply because a sworn member of law enforcement was killing her fellow citizen right in front of her. She would bear witness to that with every tool modern technology afforded her.
Shortly before Darnella Frazier’s witness was affirmed by a Minneapolis jury, a fight broke out in Columbus, Ohio. Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old, was a participant in the disturbance. Police rolled up and an officer shot Bryant to death almost immediately as she appeared to swing what looked like a knife at one of the other women involved in the brawl. ...
Now we can talk about whether or not the officer was trigger-happy with considerable authority, because we don’t have to take the officer’s word about what happened. That is why we know how Ma’Khia Bryant was killed by a police officer in Columbus, Ohio, at almost the exact moment in which another police officer was convicted of killing a citizen named George Floyd. There was video of both events. There was witness, forcing us to act on our fundamental duties to each other as citizens, and our fundamental duties as human beings. We are all witnesses now.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a36187094/darnella-frazier-bear-witness-george-floyd/
