On Friday, Americans largely spoke with one voice about the fatal excessive force used by a white Minneapolis police officer last week to subdue an unarmed black suspect, George Floyd.
The general consensus was any amount of racial discrimination in a use of force by police is too much.
By Monday morning, after a weekend of rioting, looting, defacing of public buildings and murder across the country, national consensus had waned, if not vanished.
Oh, the need to root out discrimination is still there, but Americans increasingly are looking askance that the willful destruction of public and private property as an answer to the sins of the guilty is unacceptable. And we’re afraid the more it continues, the less sympathy will redound to the original issue.
Tennessee, unfortunately, was not immune to the rioting, which occurred in Nashville and Chattanooga after proper protests in many places.