"If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay"
Led Zeppelin 1971
Over the summer of 1926, the central Mississippi basin was pummelled by heavy rains. By September, the Mississippi's tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen to capacity. On the morning of Good Friday, April 15th 1927, the Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote, "The roaring Mississippi River, bank and levee full from St. Louis to New Orleans, is believed to be on its mightiest rampage. . . . All along the Mississippi considerable fear is felt over the prospects for the greatest flood in history.” And they were right. On that very day, 15 inches of rain fell in New Orleans in 18 hours. More than 4 feet of water covered parts of the city. By the time the waters receded in August, more than a thousand people had died as a direct consequence of the flood, and nearly seven hundred thousand others had been displaced, and at least twenty-seven thousand square miles of land lay submerged underwater up to thirty feet. Property damage was estimated at one billion dollars, which was about a third of the federal budget back then. This entire series of events came to be known as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
The real takeaway from this isn't that floods are deadly or dangerous. Maybe they are, but the more important idea is that when the levee finally breaks, there's nothing you can do hold the flood back. Perhaps America is now witnessing another kind of flood, triggered by the murder of George Floyd.
But to say that Black Lives Matter is exclusively about the murder of George Floyd undermines the gravity of the issue it seeks to resolve. At its core, BLM has a simple goal: to end systemic racism. When you look at it like that, BLM is everyone's fight - against the oppression faced by every marginalized community on the planet. Neutrality just isn't an option; if you're looking the other way at BLM protests and pretending like nothing's happening, you're part of the problem, you're the oppressor.
A flood is not a peaceful affair. Neither is a revolution. The riots in the wake of BLM are nothing more than products of their time, spawned by a morally bankrupt, racist system. Hopefully, when the floodwaters recede, they leave more fertile lands.