For months prior to news of George Floyd's death, Covid-19 lockdowns in major U.S. cities meant that millions of Americans didn't go to work or attend high school or college, and were 'encouraged' by their local government or under outright orders to stay home with little exception.
Put another way, millions of Americans had nothing else to do when they ignored lockdowns to go into the streets to protest for weeks on end the death of George Floyd. Yet television coverage of the 'George Floyd protests' didn't explain this to audiences around the world.
So if audiences hadn't studied the lockdowns in the USA, they would be seeing on their TVs street protests in the USA without understanding how the protests could be so large day in and day out, night after night, for weeks.
That's not all they wouldn't understand about the protests unless they've closely studied the situation in the United States.
First of all, many American full-time workers who've had to observe lockdowns are no longer just on hiatus, they're jobless. This is because their places of work went out of business over the months of the lockdown -- or will be scaling back on full-time employees if they can reopen when the lockdown ends.
Secondly, summer school break generally begins around the end of June in the USA. During the break many high school and college students get temporary employment, usually in low-wage jobs. But again, many such jobs are no longer available because of the lengthy Covid lockdowns.
In short there is now a huge pool of Americans who have been in desperate financial straits for months, and with no immediate prospects for earning a salary when lockdowns are phased out.
I suspect this is why New York City's government suddenly announced, yesterday, the start of its planned phase-out of the city's lockdown. No matter how much Mayor de Blasio supports the protesters -- and he is big supporter -- he is in charge of a mega-city that's a big tourist draw. He would have been told by the city's police officials that if he didn't whittle down the number of street protesters, he could expect more looting and outbreaks of violence to emerge from the George Floyd protests while criminal gangs continued to run riot in the city.
A face-saving way for the city government to whittle is getting protesters, the ones who have a job to return to after lockdown, back to work.
Washington, DC's mayor would have been hearing the same warnings and advice from police officials in her city, even though she is also a big supporter of the protests.
None of these considerations showed in global 24/7 television coverage of the George Floyd protests. All that the TV audiences saw was American cities brought to a standstill by huge numbers of Americans protesting 'racial' injustice and police brutality.
The grievances fueling the street protests are genuine but they are not America's Vietnam War protests, in which many fathers took off work to join their sons in protesting. The size of the present protests is very much a phenomenon of an unprecedented perfect storm, which didn't arise from injustice or police actions, and as such has an illusory aspect.
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