Winton Dong

    dht620@sina.com

    FORMER U.S. army reservist Micah Johnson posted an angry rant against white people on a Facebook page on July 2, denouncing lynching and the brutalizing of black people.

    “Our ancestors were beaten, mutilated and killed. Why do so many whites (not all) enjoy killing and participating in the death of innocent human beings. They even go to our homeland and shoot endangered wildlife for sport,” Johnson wrote.

    Five days later, the 25-year-old Afghan war veteran pulled off a sniper-style ambush of police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five officers and wounding seven others and two civilians before dying in a police-initiated explosion.

    Johnson served as a private first class in the U.S. Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015. “His deployment in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014 earned him a number of service medals,” said U.S. army spokeswoman Jennifer Johnson. It is really an irony that he, once a solider fighting for the U.S., pointed his gun at the country’s law-enforcement officers at the cost of his own life.

    More than two decades ago when I was a university student, like many ambitious young Chinese, my dream was to study in the United States. I was deeply touched by the perseverant fighting of Abraham Lincoln to liberate black slaves, and his immortal words “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth,” in the 1863 Gettysburg Address. I was also greatly moved by the sacrifice of Martin Luther King Jr. and even today can still recite his famous “I Have a Dream” speech made in 1963.

    These seemed strong evidence to me that the U.S. was a possible Utopia that gave courage and confidence to people from all over the world. But today it seems that such a Utopia has turned into a Zootopia, where there is an insurmountable gap between people of different races, various religious beliefs, diverse sexual identities or other backgrounds, something very similar to the wide gap between predator and prey animals in the popular Hollywood animation film “Zootopia.”

    On June 12, due to his hatred of the LGBT community, a gunman shot dead 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The scar had not yet been healed when a new one was added in less than a month. On July 7, black veteran Micah Johnson created the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

    What’s wrong with the United States? Frequent mass shootings have amplified turbulence in the country, which is again convulsed by issues of race, gun violence and the use of lethal weapons by police, especially against black people.

    Earlier this year, Texas approved the open-carry proposal, allowing people not only to possess but also to openly carry firearms in public. According to Dallas Police Chief David Brown, the presence of so many armed individuals at the scene of the sniper attack caused instant confusion. After the July 7 shooting incident, U.S. President Barack Obama criticized the open-carry law. “They have a right to come here, and now they have little margin of error in terms of making decisions. So if you care about the safety of our police officers, then you can’t set aside the gun issue and pretend that that’s irrelevant,” he said.

    In handling the Micah Johnson case, it was also the first time for U.S. police to carry out a killing mission by a remote-controlled robot with about one pound (454 grams) of C4 explosives attached to the machine. Many human rights activists criticized the Dallas police for doing so. However, David Brown defended the decision, saying negotiations went nowhere and that officers could not approach the sniper without putting themselves in danger.

    Besides the use of lethal force by police, social media is also playing an important role in escalating the racial split in the United States. The recent fatal police shootings of two black men in Minnesota and Louisiana went viral on the Internet and aroused nationwide protests. Quick and widespread sharing of these videos intensified black people’s sense of frustration as a group and fast-tracked Johnson’s deadly retaliatory attack.

    (The author is the editor-in-chief of the Shenzhen Daily with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)