The summer of whiplash

I’m out today and next Friday, which means you’re getting a short note now and nothing next week because I believe in the sanctity of days off. But maybe brevity is alright anyway: It’s been a disorienting end to a chaotic month.

Jacob Blake, shot seven times in the back by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is recovering though may never walk again. Anthony Huber, who was 26 and part of the cascading protests against racist police violence in the city, is dead. He was killed along with another, unnamed, man, trying to protect others as a 17-year-old white counterprotester named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on a crowd. In stills from a video I can’t bring myself to watch, you can see Huber using his skateboard in an attempt to disarm Rittenhouse. In another video filmed earlier that night, Rittenhouse can be seen interacting with Kenosha police. He wore a backward baseball cap and carried a rifle. The officers thanked him and a group of militiamen for being there. Gave him a bottle of water.

Due South, a hurricane barreled through the Gulf Coast, causing a chemical fire in Louisiana. Out West, California burned. Everywhere, the pandemic claimed more lives, and more people lost access to their benefits. Nightly broadcasts of the Republican National Convention served as a fittingly obscene backdrop to these days of extreme violence and overlapping crisis. It’s a lot happening at once.

Trying to keep up, one moves from a sense of extreme despair to extreme possibility, often in rapid succession, over and over again, which is maybe just what it feels like to be alive right now.

I’ll see you in September for more disorientation. Take care of yourselves and others until then.
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor