Nobody ought to happy about what recent police interactions with black Americans has told us about our country. Wait, I take that back. There’s a short list of Americans who’ll take comfort in it:

• Executives of companies that operate private prisons.
• Drug dealers looking for new, young recruits to peddle their wares in our cities.
• Abortionists eager for customers.
• Pharmaceutical companies hungry for fresh tiny lungs and eyes from unborn kids of any color (red and yellow, black and white, we’re just tissue in their sight). But in practice, most of the “donors” will be brown or black, and the customers mostly white.
• Far-left public employee unions, which rely on expanding social chaos to grow their ranks of social workers, diversity trainers, and addiction counselors.
• Enemies of the United States, who want to see us weak and divided, and count on rudderless young men to join their ranks, maybe as jihadists.
• Dealers in illegal, untraceable guns.
• Race-hustlers on the left like Louis Farrakhan, and on the right like David Duke.
• Demagogic leftists, whose careers depend on black American Christians getting trapped in angry, futile tribalism — putting their race above faith or patriotism, as surely as any Klansman ever did.

The Bleak Lessons We Learned

But apart from those people, there are no winners here. And apart from another Christian Great Awakening, we can see there’s no way out. Let’s look at the likely takeaways from the George Floyd tragedy, which destroyed two lives directly (Floyd’s and Chauvin’s), and served as the pretext for riots that killed many more, while devastating whole communities — mostly of color. First, I’ll go through what various groups of interested parties will “learn,” then draw some wider lessons.

Police will learn:

• Get out. Forget your pension. Find another job. Now. Maybe as an armed security guard for some Hollywood celebrity who makes shoot-em-up movies and campaigns for gun control. You’re on the line to keep the lid on a boiling cauldron of nightmarish dysfunction, and while the public relies on you, it will never have your back. It’s your job to discipline and control wild young boys and broken young men. You have to do the work their tom-catting fathers never stuck around to do. Except that these people are younger than you, stronger than you, and are likely to have deadly weapons.
• If you can’t get out, transfer to the suburbs. Those homes are likely broken, too. But the boys there have more to lose and they know it. They fully expect to get nice, white-collar jobs and be divorced dads like their fathers. So apart from a few outliers who get a bad batch of dope, few of your interactions will be dangerous. Mostly, life will be boring, but you won’t end up in a wheelchair or in prison.
• If you can’t escape working in a city with lots of poor people, try to avoid doing your job. If you see black people fighting, don’t get involved. Let them beat up, stab, even shoot each other. If you try to stop them, even to save the helpless and innocent, you’re liable to ruin your life. Or lose it. So heck with it. Concentrate on busting graffiti artists, hassling drunks, and finding the best donuts and coffee available in the area, until you get that transfer to Highland Park or Rodeo Drive.

“Victims” Are the New Bitcoin

Politicians will learn:

• “Victim” isn’t a word with a real, tangible meaning. It’s more like a price — something set by the market, which fluctuates like the price of pork bellies or Bitcoin. The black woman getting terrorized by some armed, fatherless felon is only a victim as long as nothing politically sexier happens. Say a white cop shows up to protect her. If that scared cop makes a single mistake and harms the felon, the felon becomes the victim. Period, no questions asked. The woman just disappears. She’s a statistic. Nobody’s going to paint a mural of her gussied up to look like a plaster saint on the Community Center wall. No candles, no balloons, no visits by Reverend Al Sharpton. No multi-million dollar settlements from the City. If she dies, so what? There’s another gullible teenage girl getting talked into sex where she came from. But handsome young men who got shot by white policemen? There’s a cash cow, a golden ticket, maybe a pathway to Congress.

Cannon Fodder in the Sexual Revolution

Black Americans will learn:

• We can’t have safe communities. Why bother owning a business, if the next time a felon gets shot our own folks come rushing to loot it, even burn it? Our neighborhoods have the most criminals and most victims. But now they’re going to have even fewer, more timid or apathetic police. We have the most abortion clinics, but also the most out-of-wedlock births. When white liberals unleashed the Sexual Revolution, and the drug culture, on America, they didn’t warn us that such “revolution” is only safe if you’re swathed in a thick layer of money. We’re the grunts who die in the trenches, while the generals sup in the suburbs, maybe sometimes go to rehab.
• The left likes to use us as foot soldiers. But they don’t want to live near us, or even hire us. They’d rather import strangers from Latin America whom they consider more docile. When they decide to play at radicalism, they don’t trash their own neighborhoods. They come to ours, as if they’re Great White Hunters on safari. Then they take Ubers back to post pics about it from their mom’s comfortable basements.

We all have learned that at its foundations, in the family and the bedroom, America isn’t working. And in key ways it’s getting worse. While some policies might improve things here or there, we’re nearing the limit of what merely human solutions can do. America wouldn’t have been founded without faith in Jesus, and it won’t survive much longer without it. Nothing else bridges the deep, if irrational gaps between tribes and races. Nothing else keeps teens chaste, or marriages whole, or neighborhoods free of violence.

In the long run the choice is a new Great Awakening and a Spanish-style civil war. I pray we all make the right one. In the meantime, I’ll hold onto my prayer books and my AR-15.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”