Being here in country New South Wales, it can sometimes feel like we’re a million miles away from the worries of the world, and that can be a good thing. It certainly made dealing with social distancing easier – a small town, a small community, and (for us) a lot to do around the house.

But we do live in the modern world, which brings with it all the joys of the 24-hour news cycle. It’s just as easy to tap into the global zeitgeist here as it is in Sydney, London – or Minneapolis. This week we’ve watched with increasing horror at the events unfolding in the US. As if 2020 hasn’t been hectic enough, the erstwhile greatest democracy on earth is imploding.

Now it’s stated front and centre in this blog’s twelve commandments that there shall be no politics, and that rule won’t be broken here – so let’s talk about being human. You don’t need to be of any political or religious persuasion to understand that all people deserve equal treatment under the law, in the workplace, and everywhere else where humankind carries out its business of living together and surviving.

This is fundamental. It’s stated in scripture, which whether it was handed down by an omnipotent deity or gathered over the millennia by wise people with an interest in orderly communities, there’s a great deal of sense there which we’d be idiots to ignore. So – ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is a very sensible principle for communal beings to observe, acknowledging that none of us is superior to another.

Discrimination is an extraordinarily complex and nuanced phenomenon – and it’s pernicious, corroding what ought to be straightforward relationships between people. Most of us like to think we aren’t racist, or homophobic, or whatever, but the concept of unconscious bias has become better understood in recent years and it explains a lot about how we tend to demonise the ‘other’ – what is different from us. It’s difficult to escape, but knowing it’s there is the first step. We have to be honest with ourselves and test the logic behind our assumptions.

Anyway, no-one likes a preachy blogger, so let’s cut to the chase. No-one should die in the street at the hands of a state agent indifferent to his cries for relief. No-one has the right to take a life in a capricious manner. And those people’s respective ethnicities should have nothing to do with it.

Protesting this injustice is an obvious and powerful thing to do. Peaceful protest is symbolic of everyone’s right to express their disagreement or outrage and is built on the concept of freedom of expression. I’m less keen on the looting and burning – it’s excessive and counterproductive. In ‘80s South Africa, we debated endlessly the justification for violence as  a means of toppling a violent regime, and it was difficult to find a clear understanding. But no matter how egregious the overreaction, it shouldn’t distract us from the underlying injustice.

That’s why taking a knee is a powerful symbolic act: it does no damage but it displays a non-violent commitment to change and to non-participation in unjust, discriminatory structures. It started with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand for the national anthem ahead of the game because – he wanted to register that the high principles expressed in the anthem don’t apply to people of colour. Fair enough, no?

The policemen who today took a knee for George Floyd made a potent statement of commitment to change. It shows that they take responsibility for the changes that need to happen – and distance themselves from their colleague whose knee to the neck ended Floyd’s life.

None of us know all the answers. Burning things down won’t help, but nor will meeting this violence with more violence. Maybe it doesn’t achieve much beyond the symbolic, but taking a knee seems respectful and hopeful. So let’s take a virtual knee here in our chilly country town – in support of so many fellow people who don’t have what we have and who face greater obstacles than we do.