When You Watched TV: June 20, 2020 in Salt Lake City

When you watched TV on Facebook your jaw dropped as soon as you saw the George Floyd mural on 800 S 300 W splattered with black tar or paint. Nobody knows what happened as yet, but the one thing everyone knows is something was terribly wrong. You could smell it when cars were set ablaze several weeks earlier--when city buildings were tagged with graffiti--and you could sense it in the weeks after when throngs of people took to city streets holding signs in protest. That neither of the other murals was covered in paint was curious, perhaps a signal that certain people were zeroing in on one person here--either sending a message or perhaps it was a coincidence because maybe it was early in the morning and they were doing something sinister to the point it would open eyes all over the world. 

As dawn broke over the mountains and the birds started chirping so did your Twitter feeds. Donovan Mitchell, who's been in the news alot lately, was literally one of the first local celebrities to comment on the defaced mural, basically stating that we can't have nice things. "Can't even have a mural dawg...it's sad real sad!" he tweeted that afternoon after digesting the unfortunate news with his breakfast and lunch. What's ironic, of course, about the mural is that Mitchell has several of himself commissioned by a local artist that currently sit along the walls in the Gateway section of downtown SLC. 

When you watched TV on Twitter it's hard to know what led up to the defacing of the George Floyd mural, or maybe it wasn't as obscure, because Black Lives Matter protests were still taking place every day at various locations. To be sure, not everyone locally is happy with the BLM movement, yet BLM was gaining momentum every day it marched through the streets of Salt Lake. People from all walks of life were holding signs of support for Floyd, and for Bernardo on behalf of Latinos and for Chad Breinholt locally, as well as others who were victims of police brutality and systemic racism. 

So where do you draw the line in the sand, on the street or in the town square in which you stand, yelling at the tops of your lungs past this barrier on the lawn of the City-County Building, through your masks, through the mountain air, your body wedged between Blue Lives Matter protesters holding their signs mere feet away. It's hard to know whether change comes quick or whether or not it will take more of these peaceful protests as the rubber meets the road on June 20, whether it's someone in an Afro and BLM shirt trying to talk to a leather-vested biker wearing a black TRUMP mask who isn't responding but appears to be listening. Nobody is violent here, everyone is talking though and the police who are small in number compared to the protesters seem to be visiting and smiling. 

When you watched TV this morning, you were probably waiting for more bad news because this Covid-19 keeps going on and on and on like a broken record. And so we're all in this Groundhog Day with acid indigestion, reaching for the toilet paper from our stash time and again until we feel like we can't take it any longer and snap the bar of soap we're using for the umpteenth time in half, shattering the glass on the bathroom window--if only in our imagination. You know, like a chain reaction from all this bad news and you ask, who's next? My mom? My dad? My brother? My sister, son or daughter? How many kids are we taking to this slaughter? 

The good news is that we all prayed for salvation in our own ways, ate breakfast no matter where we lay, healthy or not, whether or not we watched our teeth slowly rot from all this coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Either way someone anonymous said we've got to wake up, be woke, grab paint and supplies, go down to the place at which this mural became a victim of circumstance and get to work. Deliberate or not, the thought is we must save the notion that social justice exists, in this sphere of time we must communicate that hate in any form doesn't appear to be okay with anyone who seeks change. 

When you watched TV on Twitter, you watched Sunday, June 21 turn into night. Three hours after Mitchell first tweeted his displeasure, we ate some lunch, went to whatever place of worship we chose and headed back, watching the sun drop behind our homes. With a Wasatch Mountains backdrop, word got out that the mural had been repainted, the visage of George Floyd remade next to Bernardo. "Reslilience!" tweeted Mitchell with a heart emoji and a little salvation perhaps--with clasped hands and a 100 emoji. Everybody could take a sigh of relief knowing that even though the day had started rather crazily, hate would not and could not win the day. 

Even though wills would be tested yet again the next day when a viewer video surfaced of a male driver screaming profanities, knocking down three BLM protesters with his car during another march, the protest moved on and nobody was seriously injured June 22. Nationally recognized sports columnist Jason Whitlock would weigh in on the protests as well this day, attributing all the ballyhoo to corporate sponsors. "We’re living in a new normal, a normal paid for by major corporations," explained Whitlock, who added that corporate sponsors dictate what content we see--in print, on the Web, the news and at the recently completed ESPY's, which took place Sunday June 21. "Russell Wilson as Django Unchained sandwiched between Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird is a television moment brought to you by corporate America," said Whitlock, who received thousands of mixed messages for his article. 

When you watched TV and you indeed saw what Whitlock was talking about at the ESPY's, or your experience watching ESPN and the news media was slightly different, Monday fell into Tuesday. More local media and former players weighed in, such as former Utah Utes football star Stevenson Sylvester with his 20-minute take as a black male experiencing systemic racism on how we might all be more receptive in this ever-changing landscape tainted by hatred and a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Jeremiah Jensen of KSL had a three-minute editorial hitting all the right notes. Even though he had a different but still important perspective as a white Mormon male of self-described privilege, he provided a faith-based take. 

Others, such as Jason Kirk, talked June 23 about how college sports teams like BYU who scheduled Liberty University--which under its President Falwell had come under recent scrutiny for some allegedly racist comments--should stop and rethink this move immediately. The same day Mitchell retweeted a tweet from a college athlete named Lloyd Cole, who talked about purposefully leaving his school's athletic clothes on underneath his regular street clothing--just in case he's ever pulled over by law enforcement. "Man...this is real af!" tweeted Mitchell, which elicited a response seconds later from a Jazz fan. "Man that sucks those thoughts even have to be in your mind," the fan replied. "Thank you for everything you've done, Donovan, you're making a big difference in Utah." With that, another week ended, we all took in a deep breath and Mitchell wouldn't tweet out his displeasure for at least a few more days, as the NBA restart inches closer to reality and perhaps some normalcy.