Palpable Fear

In light of the weeks-long social unrest throughout the United States instigated by the daylight murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, things are happening in the America that will have permanent repercussions.

Although it feels like several months ago, it has, in fact, been less than a month that Floyd was killed.  So, the country is still in shock, and people and institutions are reacting under high adrenaline.

Some of these reactions include the dismissal of people from their jobs for holding a different view of the riots/people's democratic revolution/revolt/protests/uprising from that of the dominant narrative espoused by the racialists.

Others include the pulling down of historical statues and renaming of public edifices.  By the way, these two actions occur in every revolution.

Facebook and other media are being pilloried for continuing to carry "undesirable" contents.   They will probably cave to political and social pressures in the coming weeks.

No doubt the fervor will eventually die down, and cooler heads will prevail.  Equally true is that the new normal is going to be very different from the old normal in America.  Freedom of speech and expression has gotten a bit less free.  While extant, the "out-of-bound" markers for what one can say and do just got a bit tighter and may be formalized in the form of a list of topics that one can and cannot say, as they have in Singapore.

It's interesting to note that in China, since the Deng Xiaoping reforms of the late 1970s, the space for civil society has grown exponentially, while in the United States -- land of the free -- that space has diminished.  Of course, on the absolute scale, we remain leaps and bounds freer than Red China.  But on the trajectory level, we are moving in a less free direction.  Which is not necessary a bad thing but an interesting development.

Not sure that anyone is aware of this phenomenon because the frog is being slowly boiled...