But if we want to speed the pace of change, we need unity and a plan. And national leaders who know how to lead and not divide.

The spasms of ugly violence and destruction that have enveloped Chicago’s central area in the past two days—some planned, some spontaneous days—only hand weapons to the opponents of change. The violence guarantees that further days of reckoning are inevitable in years to come, because nothing will have changed.

Like many of you, I’m still trying to get my mind around what’s happened.   

We’ve gone from the bizarreness of the COVID-19 lockdown to the jaw-dropping sight of an unarmed African-American man literally begging for his life while a white cop held him down with a knee to the neck and colleagues stood by silently for nearly 10 minutes.

It would be bad enough if Floyd was the first of such victims. But he’s only the latest in a long, long, long line. Chicago’s Laquan McDonald. Ferguson, Mo.’s Michael Brown. New York’s Eric Garner. Dayton’s John Crawford. To name just a recent few.

And those deaths are symptomatic of a wider abuse that may not kill the body but is fatal to the human soul. As one black man I’ve tweeted back and forth with put it, “You’re not a black person that has to live with this shit every day of your life.  You don’t get nervous when a cop is behind you. You’ve never been pulled out of your car and slammed on the hood.”

Accompanying that anxiety is the enormous economic inequity that exists in this city and country. Rahm Emanuel tried to make a dent in it. Lori Lightfoot has bigger plans but they so far are mostly just that. Meanwhile, in part because blacks and Latinos have been less able to hit the computer and shelter in place during the pandemic, they’ve paid a deadly price: Death rates from COVID in those communities are nearly three and two times higher than that among whites, respectively, relative to population size.

Eventually all that racial disparity adds up and things explode. People have had enough. 

That’s good to the point that it focuses attention on the need for change. But change never is easy, particularly when it involves Washington, D.C., the home of politicians who in the middle of two national crises instead fly down to Florida—twice—to see a rocket take off.

Within two blocks of where I work, the Walgreens where I get medicine was looted last evening, with special attention on the liquor department.  At about the same time, a sporting goods store up the street was emptied and torched—just a few feet north of a residential building where scores of people live.

That made TV. So did downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly’s, 42d, astonishing tale of how organized gangs arrived at certain establishments with U-Hauls to carry away their booty. Or the story of a 7-11 that just reopened but whose owner now says he’s had enough after losing his entire stock to “protesters.”

That’s wrong. “You don’t come to a peaceful protest with a bowling ball,” as Lightfoot put it. Said Police Superintendent David Brown: “Our First Amendment rights are sacred and should not be used as a ruse for criminal behavior.”

But as long as those things continue, the greater is the horrid TV picture to the nation and the message to some in politics that you don’t have to change to help these “THUGS.”

Remember what happened to the West Side shopping district after it was destroyed in riots following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King? Nothing. It stayed empty for decades, until it was reclaimed by mostly white real-estate developers. The destruction caught people’s eye for a few moments. But then public attention moved on because there was no process of change in which to enlist them.

We need police reform. And we need an effort to bring about economic equality. Both here in Chicago and nationally.

As long as we’re picking up glass and cowering in fear of rioters we’re not focusing on the prize. The prize is change. Our leaders must be squeezed and squeezed again until they bring it about. Please, Chicago, don’t make achieving that change more difficult.

As Lightfoot put it on Sunday, speaking to the entire city, “I know you can do better than you did last night.”

She’s right.