Indianapolis in troubled times: 'Why are you crying?'

INDIANAPOLIS – The sun rose above Indianapolis on Saturday morning. Saw it with my own eyes. Blue skies and alabaster clouds, puffy like balls of cotton.

Below all that heaven? Signs of the hell that had broken out the night before, late Friday, after what started in downtown Indianapolis as a peaceful protest of that tragedy in Minneapolis – police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with third-degree murder in the death of George Floyd – turned violent.

More:What we know about the Indianapolis protest that turned violent

Windows are gone in businesses along Washington Street, between Pennsylvania and Meridian. Boarding companies are downtown in their vans and trucks, moving from storefront to storefront, installing plywood where once there were glass windows. The Windsor Jewelry Co., “since 1919,” it says on the sign above the entrance, now greets pedestrians with a huge piece of plywood. Protesters left alone the Five Guys burger joint on Washington Street, but Gallery 42 next door wasn’t so lucky; a plastic tarp spans its storefront window.

As of 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, most of the damaged windows hadn’t been addressed yet. There are explosions of anger written on these windows, holes punched out by rock or brick, some windows left intact but ruined still by whatever hit it, leaving behind a single point of trauma that spiderwebs in every direction.

The sun rose above Indianapolis on Saturday morning, but look closer at those clouds. See the dark lining?

We could be in for more rain.

‘Why are you crying?’

A little girl wants to know why I’m crying, and I don’t know what to say.

It’s about 9:30 a.m. Saturday. The morning had started with coffee and oatmeal and whatever passes for sports news on ESPN’s SportsCenter. Finally, you reach for the phone. Check Twitter. See what happened to your city overnight.

Feel the rage, the frustration, the outright helplessness that fueled the protests in Indianapolis, protests that started Friday afternoon at Monument Circle because of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota on Monday, and the death of Dreasjon Reed here in Indianapolis following a police pursuit on May 6.

How do you not cry? And what do you tell the little girl? She’s 10, and innocent in the best of ways. This little girl responded to the coronavirus outbreak in March by using colored markers to write, “There Is Hope!” and about her neighborhood, “Chatham Arch is Strong!” She put those pieces of paper in her window. Neighbors walking by, they saw the signs. They know the girl, because she’s one of those magnetic kids everyone seems to know. They asked her if she’d make a sign for their house.

Her signs hang in the windows of close to 50 houses now.

This little girl just finished fourth grade at an urban IPS elementary, Center for Inquiry School 2. She has kids over for sleepovers, three or four girls at a time. She’s the only white kid in the house.

What do you tell someone like that?

What do you tell yourself?

What happened in Minneapolis on Monday makes no sense. An officer identified as Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd, who was accused of passing a phony $20 bill. With a crowd watching, with a video camera recording, with George straining and saying, “I can’t breathe,” Chauvin knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.

For the final three minutes, George wasn’t straining any more. He wasn’t talking. Wasn’t breathing.

Dead, at age 46. Because, allegedly, of a phony $20 bill.

And dead because, definitely, of a society that is broken in ways that seem impossible after all we’ve been through. Slavery and the Civil War. Brown vs. Board of Education and James Meredith. Birmingham and Watts, Emmett Till and Martin Luther King, Reginald Denny and Rodney King and O.J. Simpson.

And on and on, the racial divide closing enough for us to elect Barack Obama, then opening back up again as we elected Donald Trump. The President thinks black NFL players who kneel during the national anthem should be fired. “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now!” he yelled in 2017.

America was listening. The divide grew.

More:Doyel: Colts players explain why they kneel for national anthem

Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, tweeted on Friday a condemnation of the protests that were erupting in Minneapolis, but closed his tweet with this rainbow of hope: “We will always stand for the right of Americans to peacefully protest and let their voices be heard.”

Interestingly enough, Pence was at Lucas Oil Stadium on Oct. 8, 2017, when players for the San Francisco 49ers and Indianapolis Colts knelt during the anthem. The vice president of our country, a beautiful democracy underpinned by the First Amendment, chose to “stand for the right of Americans to peacefully protest” by rising from his seat and leaving. Later he tweeted: “I will not dignify” that particular peaceful protest.

America was watching. The divide grew.

More:Doyel: Vice President uses Colts for political purposes

This country is not safe right now. The racial divide has never been gone, not for one blessed minute, but the volatility grows every day. For years America has felt unstable, a chemical compound waiting for one more bad element to cause an explosion.

And there’s Derek Chauvin, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck on Monday in Minneapolis. Floyd is saying: “I can’t breathe.”

And then he goes quiet.

Ignorance, not privilege

She wants to know why I’m crying, and it’s just too big a question. How do I explain what is happening in our country – in our city – to this innocent little girl? She’ll never understand.

Truth be told, I don’t understand either.

Somebody like me, born into a white middle-class family – we didn’t have the white picket fence, but by God we had the Volvo – cannot begin to understand the frustration in the African-American community. Unless you’re in that community, neither can someone like you.

I’m not talking about white privilege, but white ignorance. Literally, none of us knows what it is like to be black in America, to see on the news that another black man has been killed by another white police officer, or that a black quarterback in the prime of his solid career cannot get a job or even a legitimate tryout because NFL teams are terrified of what Colin Kaepernick’s presence on their roster would do to their ticket sales.

Looting isn’t right. Throwing bricks into the windows of the CVS after hours, then darting inside and making out with baskets full of stolen goods, is not right. It’s criminal, and it’s patently unfair. What did the owner of Wei Ramen, unfortunately located at 36 E. Washington St., do to deserve that hole in the front window? The window next to it was left unscathed, which is good. It means we can see the reminder of the coronavirus pandemic:

Closed, the sign says of the dining room.

What happened to Wei Ramen and the CVS and Gallery 42 and the Circle Centre Mall on Friday night was terribly, frighteningly, brutally unfairly wrong. But the anger and frustration that fueled the looting here – and in Portland and Atlanta and Brooklyn and other spots in America – aren’t comprehensible to many of us. We are watching an expression of generations of pain.

In some cases, for sure, we are watching agitators, anarchists just wanting to see the world burn. In other cities, protesters are coming from out of town. Is that happening in Indianapolis? If so, what are you doing there?

What is anyone doing there?

What do I tell the 10-year-old girl?

Stay home, I tell her. More protests are scheduled for Saturday. They will start peacefully, but eventually the sun will go down. And I don’t like the looks of those clouds in the distance. I don’t like it at all.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.