Guilty. Guilty. Guilty

 AN EDITED VERSION OF THIS POST NOW APPEARS IN LETTERS TO THE EDITOR IN THE BOSTON GLOBE

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. 

As much as we all wish the verdict today to signal the beginning of the end of the epidemic of brutality, it took a perfect storm of events to exact the result herein. 

What if there had not been the nine minute twenty second video defining obscene cruelty? What if there had not been witnesses to these horrors? What if the police chief had not repudiated the actions of one of his own and the blue wall of silence had remained unbroken? What if Derek Chauvin had not ignored the pleas of a dying man, of a frantic crowd, with a callous indifference that made it clear the life he was suffocating out of existence was of no value? 

What would have happened then?

Yes, we are grateful for how quickly and decisively the jury responded to the overwhelming force of what was presented to them. But we must ask if this was progress or merely a moment where literally everything coalesced so that this conclusion was an inevitability.

But what if the next one is not?

That will be the real test of where we go from here.