It's been pretty heavy lately.

This year has been a shitty one so far.

Remember those wildfires in Australia? All those cute koalas being burned to a crisp? Turns out 2020 was just getting started with that one. Merely a warm-up for the crapfest that was to come.

The latest calamity, of course, is the most recent civil unrest around the treatment of Black people by police, specifically the case of Jacob Blake of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake was stopped by police with his three kids in a van, and as the video showed, went around his van to reach inside it. There was a knife inside the van, but it's unclear if he was trying to get it.

Blake ended up with seven bullets in his back. He didn't die, but it looks like he's going to be paralyzed from the waist down. His family is now claiming that he's also presently handcuffed to his hospital bed. That seems like a little overkill, doesn't it?

At an anti-brutality demonstration in Kenosha a couple of days ago, a 17 year old kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, decided he'd had enough of the protests. So, because it's America, he armed himself with a giant gun, went down to the demonstration, and ended up shooting three people, two fatally. Earlier in the protest, police were seen handing this guy a bottle of water... yes, that's right, a 17 year old kid, who's armed to the teeth, shows up, and the police don't just come out and say, "Hey, kid, ya wanna put that huge gun away? We're trying to calm things down here." Nope.

Suffice it to say, Rittenhouse is white, and Blake is Black.

Just another day in America, I guess.

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Protests have spread to the sports world, too. It started with the Milwaukee Bucks refusing to play their NBA playoff game, and has spread to MLB and the NHL. The Tigers were supposed to play last night against the Twins, but both teams refused to take the field. Last night the Mets and Marlins had a 42-second moment of silence after the first batter stepped into the box, and they all walked off the field. Powerful stuff.

Players have also been very vocal when it comes to expressing themselves on this topic. Lots of professional athletes are Black, of course, and have felt discrimination in their personal lives pretty routinely.

Naturally, this brings out the idiot fanbase who have their little tantrums and say, "Quit putting politics into sports, just shut up and play." Twitter is the perfect conduit for such idiocy, it seems: an instantaneous, worldwide audience for every thought that runs through your head, with no filter, no matter how ill-conceived it may be. (Incidentally, this also applies to US presidents.)

Professional athletes may be a lot of things, but they're also human beings with ideas and opinions and feelings. They're members of society, like you and me, and deserve to have their voices heard if they so choose. Now, if I was to protest something like this, Joe Sixpack in Peoria would have no idea; if LeBron James does, of course Mr. Sixpack would probably hear about it, and if all he wanted to do was watch the Laker game that evening, he'd be out of luck.

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Protests are a strange thing sometimes. It's been observed that mass protests against a government, business, etc. are often more for the people who are present to make themselves feel as if they belong to something bigger, as opposed to making people in charge change their behaviour.

That may be true if you've got a few hundred people assembling in front of City Hall, chanting things for a couple of hours and gradually dispersing. But for something like this? Nationwide nightly protests involving police and, occasionally, army reserves brought in? Fires, looting, riots? That's gonna make headlines, and not always for the right reasons.

I can't tell you how many protest marches I attended where you might have 5000 people peacefully demonstrating their dismay at something, and the two dozen idiots who are only there to break stuff cause havoc, and the only thing that appears on the evening news is the havoc. It's frustrating and annoying, for sure.

As if on cue, people who want things to stay exactly the same are characterizing the protests as being dangerous, and want to put a stop to them. The havoc takes over the headlines, and the actual reason people are protesting gets lost. For the record, I think they have an extremely good reason to protest. You try being systematically oppressed for 400 years and see how well you follow rules that are, coincidentally, also set by your oppressors.

I sincerely hope we'll be able to look back on this in a few months and think that this was truly the start of some large-scale change in our society. Said society tends to work pretty darn well for a person like me, but said society has also historically been built on the backs and the blood of people that aren't like me.

Recently I heard on a podcast someone saying, and I'll paraphrase, "White people have the power, and they won't give it up voluntarily, so what do you supposed to do?"

That's a great question.