"I 🖤 you."
The stuffies at George Floyd Square are one of my favorite sights in the world, they are so tender and so brave.
Over time––some have been there for almost three years now (5/25/20)––they get battered by the seasons: a month ago they were locked in ice facing every which-way.
The crew that cares for the Memorial has tidied up since. The thawed toys and artificial flowers are set upright and the many other offerings arranged in groupings.
"peace" frog
The apotropaic Fu Dog Lion I made wanted to join, when I biked past on my way to work yesterday. I tucked Fu (below, circled in lavender) among newly planted greenery--real plants, with artificial flowers stuck in.
That blue paint is the upper corner of the George Floyd painting on the pavement exactly where he died.
(The skirt on the traffic cone is my favorite bit of beautification.)
People continue to leave new offerings--the Snickers bar below and those fresh feathers, for instance.
So far as I can tell, no one harms or removes
things at the site. You'd think white
nationalists would have destroyed it. There have been threats and the like, yes, but I haven't seen or heard
of any serious damage (like bombing or torching) to the actual memorial.
The Siege
None of this is officially sanctioned, by the way. The people who hold the square are volunteers, though that doesn't seem the right word. Revolutionaries, more like.
I've
done infrequent and tiny things to prop it up---tidied the book
hut, sent some money, added a couple offerings, chatted with people, shared a few photos.
It's not my place to butt in. Many activists involved are not Black, and
that's important; but holding GF Square is, as it properly should be, a
Black-led action.
Not everyone approves of the square by a long shot, including many Black people, and I hear that people who live nearby want the intersection fully reopened. You can drive through the square now, around a roundabout with a Black power fist rising in the center, but buses, for instance, still haven't resumed their route through the intersection.
In the short term, the square is a mess and an inconvenience. You could say the toys look ugly as the sun destroys their fabric.
Yet they remain.
In historic terms, you could say that the square is protected by a band of liberty fighters holding out against a siege.
I do see it in historic terms. I love the square and its tattered remnants. I am moved by its continued existence every single time I bike through.
This is what resistance looks like over the long term, worn down by weather and time and drop in interest & support. Silly, some say. Useless.
Holding on, refusing to concede that this doesn't matter anymore, if any strategy is going to be effective, that is. We see others doing this, to great effect--sometimes to our dismay. In this case, the cause is noble.
Simply put, in spray paint:
"Stop killing us."
That's how you may win, in the long run, by sitting there like a stuffy. Or, I suppose, lose with honor––that is, knowing you have not betrayed yourself.
As for the stuffies, they say,
"We are staying here until we melt into the Earth."
