Episode 5
Screaming in Harmony, Part 1
In 2020, in South Minneapolis, MN, on 38th and Chicago, a tragedy occurred that temporarily shocked the world. It appeared a very large Black man suffocated underneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer. We’ll call this person Officer Knee.
If it hadn’t been for a teenager recording the ending of this man’s life, it probably would have gone mostly unnoticed by the people outside of 38th and Chicago.
Her film produced a sort of metaphoric picture, supposed proof positive evidence that the Black race has always suffered or been killed underneath the knee of white supremacy.
A later and more extensive autopsy showed the Black man overdosed on drugs and died without the aid of Officer Knee. (See the documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, free on the internet).
There were other cameras that eventually showed the rest of the story. What another cop’s camera showed was an incredible struggle between the Black man, George Floyd, and officers. He was refusing to get into a squad car.
After the cops succeeded in getting him into the car, it was apparent he wasn’t going to stay there. At one point, Officer Knee tried to extract him out of the other side of the car by pulling on his legs.
It appeared George got a solid kick into Knee’s chest, which then glanced up, kicking the cop in the chin, knocking off his cop cam, and shoving his badge to one side of his shirt.
Officer Knee was obviously pissed off. At this point, there was no way this elitist, self-righteous cop was going to let George escape without some type of retribution, and we don’t need to repeat the rest of this tragic story.
A major force then joined together, waving signs, rioting, and shouting around the world that—Black Lives Matter. I think for at least part of the world, it was like, well duh, all lives matter. For a few days or weeks, though, much of the world ‘Screamed in Harmony’.
When a person’s voice sings a note right on key, it produces harmonics. It sounds like there is more than one person singing the same note. Unless a person has perfect pitch, in other words, is able to hit the note or hear it exactly right, they sing off-key.
For most of us, we don’t have perfect pitch when we sing or hear other singers. But if the singer consistently sings the same off-key range on every note, it passes as good singing.
I've heard that in a recording studio, there is often a device that, when an off-key singer sings into it, it auto-corrects the note to back on key. However, if the same singer sings in a concert without the device, many times there is echo and other distortions that hide the off-key singer (off notes) so nobody notices.
When a group of singers can sing on key together, it sounds like voices from heaven. They will often start a band, and if they are also better-than-average instrumentalists with a great recording engineer, there is the making for a masterpiece of music. The Beach Boys and the Moody Blues were two early bands that could produce 5-part harmonics.
In 1973, a pinnacle band produced perhaps the best album when an English group called Pink Floyd released an album titled, “Dark Side of The Moon”. As a bonus, it also had great lyrics, which seemed to reflect our plights in life. There have been other recordings, and this is just one example.
The original Star Trek TV show had great stories. The bridge of the starship Enterprise was diverse with races from our world and universe, with also a slightly green science officer, Spock, with pointed ears from the planet Vulcan. They all respected each other and had one goal or voice in harmony: to go where no one has gone before.
Oftentimes, the shows reflected issues in our current lives. One show showed how stupid racism is when two aliens boarded the Enterprise. One alien’s face was black on one side and white on the other. His enemy’s face was opposite white and black and therefore inferior.
Another show had a sparkly, floating alien invade the Enterprise that no one saw at first. It caused the imprisoned Klingons (enemies of the empire) on the Enterprise to constantly want to battle the crew of the Enterprise, and in return, also the crew to constantly battle the Klingons. The alien got its strength from each other fighting. Only when everyone discovered the alien did they quit fighting, and the alien dissipated.
We will discover we have a similar alien on our planet doing the same today.
There used to be a standard for making great music and shows. However, now it’s turned into something so degraded and stupid, it is no longer music or inspirational shows. IMHO.
When people no longer have the desire to put in the work to make a music masterpiece, they will often take our attention away by removing articles of clothing, doing guttural screaming, using dumbed-down rhyming lyrics, creating distortion in instruments, or displaying some sort of visual shock. The latter seems to have become the standard now, and the more shocking, the better.
We seldom or no longer know how to sing in harmony or make music masterpieces or works of inspiration, but instead look for and measure the shock value. This is part of the straw in this episode, to become a similar device from a recording studio to discover and help us sing in harmony again, losing forever the distorted shock value used for the deception of Screaming in Harmony.
About 8 blocks north of 38th and Chicago is a street called Lake Street. It stretches in a straight line from the far west end of Minneapolis to the east side border to the Mississippi River into the twin city, St. Paul. It effectively divides south Minneapolis in half.
This is the same street the rioters burned down after the death of Floyd. Gov Walz, the AG, and mayors of the 2 cities sat on their hands for 2 days without calling the National Guard. Only after President Trump said he would call out the army did they finally do something, too late.
In 1992, there were cartels of gangs terrorizing Minneapolis, with Hispanic gangs on the north side of Lake Street and Black gangs on the south side, each fighting for more turf and control.
At the time, there was a pizza restaurant on Lake Street in the middle of the gang wars. Minneapolis police frequented it often, since many were in the area to try and keep the young gang members from killing each other and generally keep the peace, but especially to protect innocent people from getting injured or killed.
It was about 1:30am when two white Minneapolis police patrol officers had stopped into the restaurant and sat at the counter for their much-needed coffee break from the life-threatening, chaotic world outside the restaurant.
After a few minutes, two Black men from the Vice Lord’s gang burst in and, without warning, shot patrolman Jerry Haaf 4 times in the back, and wounding his partner. Jerry didn’t have time to say he couldn’t breathe, as was granted to George Floyd. He was already dead on the floor. The two Vice Lord cowards ran out the door.
There weren’t smartphones at the time to record this tragedy, so the world didn’t know what happened—except every cop in the country probably sooner or later heard the news and started Screaming in Harmony—as cops from around the country mourned his brutal and senseless death.
If there was an underlining current of distrust between the police and Black people before, then after this senseless murder, there was a huge chasm, and it has lasted for years.
It seems probable that cops had this senseless murder or others in the back of their minds as PTSD when they confronted Black people, and maybe it determined one cop to carry out their own self-righteous vengeance on Black people, including George Floyd.
I am not saying this to compare the murders or somehow say one tragedy was worse than the other. I am saying, once we let our elitist self-righteousness take over, people suffer and die. But let’s look at a bigger picture. Another straw, please, Coop.
When a person in the USA looks at a non-Black person in this country, they have no idea how their ancestors came here. When someone looks at a Black person, they know, most likely, slave traders stole their ancestors away from their family, friends, and country to be locked in chains, thrown into the bottom of a slave ship, and suffer miserably for weeks, crossing a frigid Atlantic Ocean.
After the ship docked on the southern shores of our country, they then joined other Black people in miserable slavery, with no hope of ever doing anything else.
Now this is where I need to write lightly, because everyone’s senses are heightened to flash out their racism card. There is no racism here, just revealing the bigger picture.
Slavery is not unique to Black people in our country. It started about 4500 years ago, when one kingdom overtook another, and those who the conquerors didn’t kill became their slaves. Yes, it’s been going on that long, including with Jewish people who were also enslaved for centuries.
Slavery is still happening in just about every country in the world. The current slaves today are every color and race, now mostly young boys and girls trapped into work and sex slavery.
So now we have a conundrum, because from the previous entries, we know we all suffer from disorders and deceptions. We are all broken. How can we sort out the lies of distortion to expose the truth?
As mentioned before, we all can have PTSD, and we all have an uncontrollable force within us called self-righteousness, or we are the only person who knows what is right or good, and everyone else is wrong—until they come around to our sense or narrative of what is right. We are all trying to get others to Scream in Harmony with us.
We need to remind ourselves of the bigger picture. There is a force in our world that has taken over and put into place people and systems to make sure we stay divided—reinforcing our self-righteous beliefs and causing more PTSD.
Now, there are many people who are reading or listening to this that will keep their blinders on, refusing to see the bigger picture. They are cemented in the tradition of, “My daddy believed or did it this way, my granddaddy believed or did it this way, his daddy believed or did it this way,” and so on.
We will blindly continue on in our chosen ways, but we don’t have to. We can break our personal chain of traditional mind slavery, and for starters, read and listen to others while trying to block out the distortion and shock value.
In our next entry, we will see how slavery invaded the world. Please keep reading and listening.
,
