The goodness

A citizen with a mask in which you can read George Floyd's words: "I can't breathe." Stephen Maturen / AFP

"I'm going to die….

I'm not a bad guy. "

Here are the last words of George Floyd, the black American citizen who perished asphyxiated under the knee of white police officer Derek Chauvin.

One wonders if in those final moments he was addressing his executioner or himself.

If himself, as I dare conjecture, he carried out a quick soul-searching.

The one that each of us could do under the right pressure.

Sometimes I imagine that the Final Judgment comes suddenly, with all its trumpetry, and that God puts his knee on my neck and asks me, pressing without mercy, how I have behaved.

Compared to you, I would tell him, I have not been a bad guy.

It is strong to say that to God.

Knowing him, the same thing increased the pressure on the knee, as the white cop did when he heard the pleas of the black taxpayer.

I think a lot about those 8 minutes and 46 seconds of extreme violence, of agony.

The knee held because it was the knee of the system, the knee of God in a way, even though it belonged to a specific individual.

Hence their cruelty.

The system does not listen, we have seen it in the ease with which blacks are shot or the poor are ignored.

His knee materializes from time to time to give us the opportunity to be scandalized and to pretend that justice is done, but it is always there, invisible, like the hand of the market (perhaps they are the same thing), on someone's neck, normally, on the necks of the most disadvantaged classes.

Who, in his last moments, would wonder if he has been a good guy?

Just someone naive, very naive.

Just someone who still believed in salvation.

Only the disinherited on earth still believe in goodness.