(Politics changed this weekend, some dramatic new realities to consider on both sides, especially for people who call themselves Democrats or progressives. Hating Trump or replacing him with someone else is not enough any longer if it ever was.)

Between Friday and today, the 2020 presidential campaign changed, and radically. The Democratic Party has taken for granted that their supporters – especially their African  American supporters – would support anyone who wasn’t President Trump.

For me, it is not a time to despair over the brutal collision between a Pandemic and rioting all over the country.  What a year, and it’s not half over.

It’s a time to pause and wonder about what is coming next, and how we all will to deal with it. This is the story of this moment in our political history, a  historic campaign that hasn’t even started yet.

I will be authentic, as I try to be, and point out this is a fascinating time to be an American, let alone someone writing about it. It is painful to look at the news every day; it is also hypnotic.

I’ve argued before that hating President Trump accomplishes nothing. This awful week proves it; the campaign will challenge people who want a more decent and honest and humane America to do some heavy thinking.

Self-serving offerings of the usual moral superiority aren’t going to cut it.

If people of compassion and empathy wish to see a kinder America emerge, then they need to support something more concrete than trashing Donald Trump on Facebook and Twitter.

They need something bolder than texting and standing on street corners calling for peace or persuading ourselves and each other that we are not racist.

For one thing, African-Americans aren’t buying it any longer. For another, I’m not sure it’s even true.

The George Floyd video has challenged me to look more deeply into myself and be honest about what I see when it comes to race. It makes me queasy about my smug assumptions about myself.

The violence and bloodshed over the weekend are heartbreaking.

Protesters and black leaders have said their goal is no longer simply to replace President Trump but to change the bloody and heartbreaking history of race in America.

It has always been unfair in my mind to dump all of this on the police, who are caught in the middle of a dreadful social crisis that is so much larger than them and has existed for 400 years.

It is much easier to throw police officers in jail than to lock up the people who have enabled this system and keep it going, or to hold them accountable.

The President, as is his tendency, is trying to have it all.

He has suggested shooting looters and promised the mostly black protesters outside of the White House that they would encounter “vicious dogs” and power weapons if they tried to bridge the White House gates.

His sleaziness and dishonesty are actually getting to be boring, they are so predictable.

This is yet another example of the President’s broken instincts when it comes to the right thing to say or do to human beings he is sworn to serve and protect in times of trouble.

Either he doesn’t know that Southern sheriffs sicked “vicious” dogs on civil rights demonstrators for years (A), or he knows and doesn’t care (B), or he is (C) tossing some raw meat to his hungry followers, they call it “dog-whistles.”

I’ll take C.

He loves to tip-toe right up to outright bigotry, then dances away and claim ignorance. What me? His credibility is about as big as my bank account.

The President has also called up George Floyd’s family,  called them “terrific people,” and tweeted that his MAGA supporters “all love the black people.”

Once again, he’d fled the field and blown yet another opportunity to lead and calm unnerved people. And to be more popular. We don’t need to keep beating this drum. He’s way over his head.

When the reality TV show runs into actual reality – Pandemics, cities burning – he can’t handle it, and he has no support team around him that can.  He just never knows what to say, and every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like Elmer Fudd on crazy glue.

Some leaders rise to the moment. He falls every single time.

Like the mayor of Atlanta suggested yesterday, he just needs to stop talking. And I need to grow hair.

Joe Biden and the so-called “progressive” wing of the party has a challenging task.

African-Americans are a critical element of support for the Democratic Party.

They are losing faith and hope in the country their ancestors never sought to live in.

They didn’t turn out in high numbers for Hilary Clinton; many political people believe that cost her the election. More and more, many blacks just don’t think voting will make a difference.

From the despairing African-America perspective, the progressive movement and the Democratic Party have done little for them but talk and mouth cliches and platitudes.

Every white person I know has told me at one point or another that they are not racist. I’ve said it myself.

But there is a staggering disconnect there. We are no longer the best judges of ourselves. Look what a mess we have made.

If people in any dominant or privileged position are not racists, then how come all these black kids are dead for no apparent reason other than that they are terrified of the police, and the police are terrified of them?

How come so many black men are in jail? How come so many have been shot and killed for no reason?

Gail posted this message on my blog the other night in the middle of all this chaos:

“One thing, though, we should never refer to Donald J. Trump as just President Trump — but always and in every reference, all of us from private citizens to print and on-air journalists, need to call him by his real title as Impeached President Donald Trump.”

No, Gail, that will not be my thing, that is not what I need to do. I don’t believe that is what anybody needs to do.

Donald Trump is a duly-elected President; he deserves respect for that title. And what will this do to make one black man safer, or bring George Floyd back to life, or keep one police officer at home with his family rather than in jail for murder?

Another “progressive” called me a racist and a creature of white privilege for suggesting that rural Americans suffer as much or more than African-Americans? Let’s do our part to divide the country too!

Is this really what we need to be talking about? Is this what will bring the country together again?

Is this really what will alter the economic,  employment, criminal justice, and gun violence and other issues that have engulfed so many black peoples in America?

Joe Biden has some serious decisions to make. He personifies the Democratic ethos when it comes to race: use black Americans when you need their votes, ignore them the rest of the time.

Even Barack Obama, like so many of his predecessors, did the same thing. He explained lamely that he didn’t want to be seen as the “black” President.

Depriving Trump of his rightful title will not endanger his re-election in any way.

Nor will it improve the lives of black Americans, who are not only outraged over a long and horrifying fate of questionable police shootings of their sons but who are bearing the economic and disproportionate burden of the coronavirus while the country rushes to re-open.

In many cases, theirs are the first jobs to go, and the last to come back.

The virus is killing so many of their mothers, fathers, and grandparents, and the government is telling them the worst is over.

And soon, say the doctors and economists, they will also bear the burden of a wounded economy, black people are among the most economically vulnerable to a recession or depression.

Real estate analysts estimate that millions of African American families will soon be evicted from their apartments and homes.

The question isn’t why people are burning buildings down and looting, but why they didn’t do it sooner and aren’t doing it more?

Captain America Biden is a decent and good-hearted man, but he also typifies the underside of the Captain American idea, America’s dark secret.

Lots of blacks have voted for lots of Democrats, including him.

But that doesn’t seem to have changed anything of substance for young black men and women in America.

To many blacks, he is the very face of a system that enabled racism and suppression for centuries, and that never was designed to serve them in the first place.

Here it is, 2020, coming on two centuries since emancipation, and communities all over the country are still fighting to remove the statues of men who risked their lives and shed and honor to defend slavery.

The country has never acknowledged the horror of slavery, or its devastating effect on black people, we never speak of our enthusiastic promotion of it long after most civilized countries outlawed it.

We have yet to come to terms with it in any meaningful or authentic way.

I can simply not imagine a young white jogger run down in the street and getting butchered by private citizens in their pick-ups, or white, middle-aged men getting kneed in the neck for 10 minutes while begging for help.

I hope I will never destroy another person’s property, but I’m not sure what I would do if that were my daughter or father or brother in that video.

I was a police reporter in New York, Atlantic City, Washington, and Philadelphia, and I respected and befriended many of the police officers I worked with. I found them to be, for the most part, honest, decent, hard-working family men.

They reveled in doing good and risked their lives again and again to help others. I still believe that is true.

When there were issues of brutality relating to incidents I had not seen, I tended to believe their versions of things. I rode around with police officers every night for years and never witnessed an act of brutality, let alone murder, even though I knew they happened.

I do not believe that the simple truth behind all of these shootings is that those police officers on the news got up in the morning and put on their uniforms and set out to murder young black men.

Life is rarely that black-and-white. Yet murder happens, again and again, and again. And it’s police officers doing the killing.

It almost doesn’t matter at this point. When it comes to African-Americans, the criminal justice system does not work for them. Policing has become a tragic and intolerable failure in their communities.

The changes being called for transcend the police, something the corporate media doesn’t like to mention.

The Democratic Party has been running from that issue for years, and so have many of the progressives who are so obsessed with Donald Trump that they have not bothered to understand his rise and popularity.

The sometimes over-the-top hatred of President Trump is a roadblock and a detriment to change. It’s a wall, not a path or solution.

What will unseat him are specific and comprehensible plans to make the country kinder and better.

Things like affordable and available health care,  wealth equality, daycare, and more equitable distribution of wealth.

They are all things that people want and that the President opposes.

I worked for excellent newspapers, and I was told again and again that we didn’t write stories about African-Americans and violence, the code used was “no.2’s” or “blues.’ Stories about “no. 2’s,” or “blues” did not get into the papers, the theory being that violence happened to black people all of the time. Thus it was not news.

I did protest those policies, mostly because I lobbied for my stories, not because of racial justice.

“They shoot each other all the time,” one City Editor told me, “it’s just not news.”

I did not recognize then what I realize now, that this policy was part of a vast, historic and still unacknowledged system of oppression that dated to the birth of our country, and did not recognize our slaves and their descendants as equal human beings.

During the Philadelphia riots in 1968, which I covered, a black minister told me that “racism wasn’t an offshoot of the American Revolution, it was the point.”

He also saved my life when rioters tried to burn my car with me inside.

Racism was, in many ways, the foundation of our country. The people who supported slavery wrote our Constitution and built our system of government.

I am not African-American, but I am wary of people telling me they are not racist. Racism bubbles up all around us, from joggers butchered like deer to a terrified woman in Central Park threatening an African-American bird watcher.

I am not going to sit here and tell anybody I am not a racist, how could I possibly know any more? And I’m not into confessionals, I am responsible for my life.

How could I claim purity in the face of so much undeniable and heartbreaking evidence?

I got the shock of a lifetime when I started seeing one video after another showing police officers shooting black men in the back, shooting them 16 times while they lay bleeding on the street, shooting them in backyards, as they clutched their cell phones, or had police put their feet on their necks while they lay suffocating.

This brutality is no longer an argument. It is a truth that challenges our humanity.

I wonder how many police version of events I believed when I should have challenged and investigated them? But I’m not writing out of guilt or self-redemption. I was a good reporter; I did the best I could and knew.

For all that, I am in a minority when I say that there are many signs of progress. The officer involved was fired almost instantly and indicted for third-degree murder three days.

That is very different than the way these kinds of cases have always been handled.

Police chiefs all over the country supported the protesters and denounced the way the police officers treated Mr. Floyd. Progress matters.

Things are different. But I’m not the one who needs convincing.

I am not African-American, and I did not and do not live in fear of the police,  I don’t need to practice non-threatening opening of the glove box for my registration, or to make sure to keep my hands on the wheel.

I did not even think of teaching my daughter how to keep from getting shot if she was pulled over, and the very thought that she could be shot and killed when she went out to buy some ice cream stuns me to the core.

But all things are political, especially in an election year in 2020

The political environment changed this weekend, as hundreds of fires still burn all over the country. The political system, already overburned, just got another message, a problematic but shattering reality to deal with.

And there is still the genuine possibility that the Pandemic will return in force sometime this fall or winter. That is terrible news for President Trump. He has backed into yet another awful corner, two dismal leadership failures in a row.

In his usual cowardly Friday night way, he pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, even as the American Medical Association begged him not to do it in the middle of an ongoing Pandemic, and warned it would cost American lives. Another distraction, another place to hide.

He will be the father of a third Pandemic if it comes. Who holds leaders accountable when they cause people to die?

Biden will now have to give particular thought to his vice-presidential pick. If he has any gumption left in that aging body, he will consider Stacy Abrams from Georgia or someone like her for vice-president.

That would send a compelling message to black and white America that things just might change and scare the wits out of Donald Trump. Criticism from women undoes him every time.

In any case,  Mr. Biden has to move past soothing platitudes and persuade people that he has healthy new ideas around for changing the racial paradigm. What is happening now is unacceptable and will tear us farther and farther apart.

The country needs a leader.

As for President Trump, he is showing us yet again that he is a weak leader for a country reeling from an unprecedented Pandemic and a wrenching explosion in racial pain and anger.

Nothing about this makes me any less hopeful about our future.

Once again, we are awakened, challenged to take on difficult but essential tasks. Once again, everyone is paying attention and beginning to see what the stakes are. Four more years of this is a powerful incentive to get people to vote.

As I have mentioned every time I’ve written about politics, this crisis, along with the Pandemic, is far more complex and urgent than Donald Trump’s willingness or ability to deal with it.

He will fall the way demagogues always fall, by his own sword. And over time, we will end up a better, kinder, people and country.

As Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandi proved so convincingly (the odds against them were much greater than the odds against Joe Biden), compassion and empathy and non-violence have shown the most powerful weapon there is for affecting significant social and political change.

Hatred is for losers and the short-sighted. It’s the cheap and easy way.

I can’t promise to live long enough to see my country, which has been so good to me, come together, but as a betting man, I would put some money on it happening.

I bet we will make America kind again, that is something to live for.