Non-opinion column

I had an unremarkable weekend.

I know I'm not the only one, but it kind of feels like it.

While I stayed home, safe and sound in my little town, miles and miles away from any large population center, the major cities of this country once again burned with riots.

It's a familiar sequence of events. What should have been an innocuous encounter between a black man and law enforcement turns fatal. Communities march in protest of the gross police misconduct. A window is broken by a troublemaking vandal. A protestor is assaulted by an out-of-control cop. Violence escalates and the situation erupts into chaos.

This is usually the part where I share my take on the situation. After all, everybody in the country seems to have one. My social media feed is full of friends and family sharing support or condemnation for one side or the other. It's all anybody is talking about.

It's the question of the moment. Will the end result of this protest be worth the damage it leaves in its wake? History indicates that this latest round of protests is likely to be just as ineffective at bringing lasting change as the last one, or the one before that, or the one before that.

But does anybody have any better ideas?

I don't.

As previously noted, I'm a white guy, living in a little town, miles and miles away from any major population center. I've never had to deal with the systemic racism that has plagued these communities for generations. I don't understand it and I don't know what it's going to take to fix it.

Sure, I can have a take on the individual aspects of the chaos. I can condemn the rioters and looters, be they overzealous protestors or white agitators trying to throw flames on the fire. I don't think it's a particularly controversial position to say that destroying a Target isn't going to achieve any goal, unless that goal is to sneak out with a sweet new LEGO set.

Likewise, I'd like to think we can all agree that a cop shoving an old man with a cane to the pavement because he wasn't walking fast enough is way over-the-line. One would think that reacting to protests about police brutality would make officers more cognizant of their own behavior, but that's obviously not the case for everybody wearing a badge.

The late Sheriff Linn Larson once told me that bad cops make it difficult for good cops to do their job. I've had many positive encounters with police, both professionally and personally. Like the protestors, it's important to make a distinction between those that just want to bring peace to their community with those clearly itching for a fight. It can hard to reconcile the videos of police officers joining hands with protestors and kneeling in solidarity with their communities with other videos of police marching through residential neighborhoods shooting paint canisters at civilians on their own property, but it must be recognized that this is not so simple a matter as "one side good, other side bad."

Except when it comes to attacking journalists. This may be a personal bias, but I'm getting pretty tired of watching journalists get shot at or arrested by the people that are supposed to be protecting them, but that's a whole other column I don't have the energy to write.

But as for this chaos as a whole, to answer the question of whether or not this is the most effective way to seek justice, I've got nothing.

Neither the riots nor the underlying causes are likely to touch my life in any tangible way. I haven't been pushed into such a dire corner. Obviously I support the underlying goal, but I am not qualified to judge whether or not the ends will justify the means, so I'm not going to.

Not everybody has to have a take on everything.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and hopes everybody can soon have as unremarkable a weekend as he did.