We’ve come full circle from George Floyd to Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, from Black Lives Matter to a deeper understanding of the interdependence of all who cherish life, liberty and human dignity. In this year 250, when America will renew her vows, we all are linked in a chain of resistance, struggling to overcome an enemy fueled by racism but whose evil extends far beyond the denigration of any one particular race. It’s no longer just about BLM, though of course that is a key component of this battle, but it is the fight for the dignity for all human beings that propels us now. And humanity is winning.
The distance between Floyd’s murder and Good’s has been measured at less than a mile. An impromptu American Via Dolorosa has been created in Minneapolis, with three stations of this tragic Passion pilgrimage thus far - and counting - taking its place in American history alongside other sacred paths like the Freedom Trail in Boston. There you can make pilgrimage from the site of the Boston Massacre in 1770 to the Tea Party of 1773, less than a mile, and then to the Old North Church, where the fateful ride of Revere was witnessed two years after that, in 1775, leading to the famous firings of Lexington and Concord.
Each revolution germinated for five years, first in the boiling Bostonian cauldron of the colonies and more recently in Minnesota’s Floyd-to-Pretti Petri dish.
Five years is all it took to go from an initial bloody provocation to a history-altering protest, from an act of unimaginable brutality to a full-scale rebellion, one that could not be put down by force. Five years and less than a mile.
Five years is all it took. And then General Gage lost control of Boston and Trump lost control of America.
And both revolts were powered by warning whistles. We know how powerful those anti-ICE instruments were in Minnesota. But whistles served a similar purpose during the American Revolution, employed for “military signaling.” This photo was found in a collector’s catalogue:
It calls to mind this verse from the prophet Zechariah:
Indeed, with the call of the whistles today, as with the toot of the fife and drum, the ardor of the resistance continues to increase exponentially.
Since 2020, the pendulum has gyrated from the understandable but politically unsustainable fury that followed Floyd’s death, which led to the insidious Trumpist demonization of “woke” and “cancel culture.” And now, just one year into Trump 2.0, the pendulum has swung right back to Minneapolis and, this time, unlike the BLM protests of 2020, we’ve seen a response that has not only been overwhelming in size, but also in diversity and non-violence. It is multigenerational, multi-denominational and multi-ethnic.
For those (like me) who were disappointed that the protests in 2020 were not so broad-based, allowing the fabricators and fomenters of Fox to dub them “race riots,” we must recall the pervasive fears of those first months of Covid. But this year, with No Kings, L.A., and rallies everywhere, and culminating in Minneapolis, we have protests that look like America - all of America - and that has been too much for this loony-toon regime to bear.
We’ve come full circle to the same sacred Minnesota ground, but this time with lessons learned. We understand that the prudent approach is not to “defund” law enforcement or immigration policy, but reform it. This time, the enemy is not the local manifestation of a racist police culture, but the core root of that racism. Trumpism itself is a virulent strain of white supremacism exported directly from the confederacy and Jim Crow, by way of Mar a Lago. On the streets of Minneapolis in 2020, that vicious paramilitary fist was directed primarily against Blacks, and now, in its metastasized 2025 form, it’s directed ostensibly against immigrants but primed to attack anyone who is “different,” and anyone who dares to stand up to the King. Even an intensive care nurse.
It is on the streets of Minneapolis that the shot-heard-round-the-world was fired this year, not at the King’s soldiers but by the King’s men, the forces of Project 2025. Three bullets through the window of a car driving away, heading to safety, with the victim’s dog poking its head out the window and a glove compartment filled with a child’s toys. This was an attack on innocence, on everything we are sworn to protect: the child and the dog. It was an attack on dignity.
On the streets of Minneapolis the Second American Revolution began, initially with a knee on George Floyd’s neck, and conclusively with a shot in Alex Pretti’s back. Make that ten shots.
On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent, became the first casualty of the first American Revolution, when two British bullets hit him in the chest as he led a confrontation against the King’s troops. In all, five were martyred in that confrontation. Attucks is buried alongside other victims of the Boston Massacre, in Granary Burial Ground.
The British troops tormented the people of Boston for years, until March 17, 1776, when the King ordered them to evacuate to Halifax and the siege ended. For the people of Minneapolis, Evacuation Day is, hopefully, happening right now. Today. The self-proclaimed King has ordered ICE to leave.
But the Second American Revolution has already begun and, like the first, the objective will be to enhance human dignity: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all “men who are created equal.” Only this time maybe it won’t just be for white males. Dignity for all.
In his Laws of Teshuvah (Repentance) (4:4), Maimonides lists five sins that are hard to shake. Among them is dignifying oneself through the humiliation of another. It’s hard to shake because most of us are indifferent to the humiliation of others, so there is little social motivation to repent. This means we have to place an even greater emphasis on preserving the dignity of our neighbor. In tractate Avot, Rabbi Eliezer says, “Let your neighbor’s dignity be precious to you as your own. (Avot 2:10)
I made this point in my Rosh Hashanah sermon for 2020, delivered before an empty sanctuary because of Covid, as I spoke passionately about the killing of George Floyd.
Here’s some of what I said:
…However long it took for that one precious life to be extinguished - it was the most impactful footage of a murder since the Zapruder film. And it was, and for all time will remain, 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
It is now part of history. And with all the perplexity of this Covid period – those 526 seconds stand out because they lifted a cloud that has been suffocating this country for 401 years.
In fact, our world was already off kilter long before someone ate a bat on the other side of the world last year and set off a pandemic. But we were too busy to notice. Once the lockdown set in, however, we had time to notice. We had time to focus on what is important in life – lots of things – perhaps first and foremost, we had time to focus on those 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and we had time to understand that George Floyd’s life mattered. And we began to regain our moral bearings as Americans, and to finally come to fully understand the enormity of the sins of our fathers and mothers – which, as it turns out, are ours as well. ALL OF OURS. Because we own it. We are responsible.
We began to see the racism in ourselves. We began to look around and see so many people suffering, people of all colors and creeds, and we cried out with a sense of recognition that we never had before, seeing injustice with a clarity that we never had – we cried out that all human beings deserve to live lives of dignity, including and especially those who have been so cruelly denied it.
Now, five years and several mad gyrations of the pendulum later, we are back to the fight for human dignity, but in an expanded form. Just as the founders of our country never lost their focus on dignity and simply expanded it over the course of a couple of centuries, with the Bill of Rights and later amendments, so have we expanded the quest for dignity over these past five years to go beyond one particularly virulent strain of racism. Led by our Minnesota Minutemen, we are out to topple all forms of hate.
And against all our resolve, all this pathetic president can do is chuckle while texting the “R” word about the governor of Minnesota and shamelessly steal the rainbow flag from the Stonewall Inn. And that wasn’t even the most hateful thing Trump did this week. His overreach in sending out a meme depicting the Obamas as apes has shamed our racist-in-chief into disavowing his own posting, though of course not apologizing.
Sometimes it is best to set disgust aside and let polls do the talking. And as a result, in Florida and Texas, the places where “woke” supposedly went to die, we are seeing a massive Latino awakening that could shake the nation in November. Bad Bunny was just a foretaste. As the pendulum swings, it could well be along the Lower Rio Grande and Dade County where Project 2025 will itself go to die.
Yes, this Second American Revolution, like the first one, is all about dignity. It’s a long road that we’ve traveled over the past five years.
Yet such a short distance.
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