I’m pretty used to seeing all kinds of videos and covered a lot of bloody stuff when I was a reporter, but my heart sank when I saw this photograph out of Seattle Washington this morning.

I knew it was important beyond what it captured.

It is of a nurse in scrubs who was rushing to help a friend who had been hit in the head with a rubber bullet and was bleeding.

But in the context of the presidential election, it is crucial.

This is one of those iconic images that will define our time and almost certainly, alter the course of our history.

Video images, a new kind of universal journalism,  our transforming our democracy, and how we see ourselves as a nation.

People often say this is not America; we’ve never seen anything like this. But they don’t know their history. There were no cellphones on the Pettus bridge.

These images from Seattle, as disturbing as they are, are not nearly as bad as those of Alabama police dogs tearing into black marchers in 1965.

The police and their bosses thought they were quashing blacks on that bridge and putting them in their place. They were wrong. Those images backfired on the politicians who ordered them and the police who carried them out.

They awakened the consciences of whites all across the country and led to the passage of the first civil rights legislation in American history. The federal government never looked stronger or more just.

These images  – that picture of the nurse among them – will do the same thing now.  That image of the nurse has already gone viral all across the Internet and much of the world.

This is not the American people want to see, especially now when they are frightened and confused about the pandemic running out of control, and worried about their children and our leaders claim it’s not a big deal.

President Trump is claiming that only he can stop the disorder erupting all over the country, but he seems not to realize that he is the President now. If there is a disorder in the country, it is his, not Barack Obama’s or Joe Biden’s.

He was the change in 2016; now, he is the thing that must be changed.

It is difficult sometimes to know what to feel in 2020 America.

I understand the awful, no-win position many police offers are in.

I admire the passion and idealism of the protesters, many of whom are trying to save our democracy while politicians from both parties fiddle in Washington and call their favorite lobbyists looking for money.

No one can win these conflicts unless it is democracy itself, which so many of these moms, veterans, dads, and others are fighting for, right or wrong.

I think photos like this will propel them to victory and a special place in our history.

I was a police reporter for some years, and I know the vast majority of policemen and women don’t get up in the morning and decide to shoot people, black or otherwise.

Many -most –  do a lot of good in a lot of ways, something that gets lost in all of those videos.

But they are being manipulated into an awful place if you follow your history.

They are just following orders, and free societies have learned again and again that people who say that can commit appalling crimes themselves, they seem devoid of conscience and moral choice.

They are being used and manipulated, and I’m sorry they have no choice but to respond to what they are told to do.

Those federal agents have no business being there, trying to take over a city’s responsibility under the law to control violence. Whether they are doing a good job or not is beside the point.

The city leaders will be held accountable to their voters, not to federal agents in camo. That’s how our system is supposed to work..

I’m sure the officer spraying that nurse felt in danger and reacted instinctively,  and I’m sure the nurse was trying to help an injured young man. That this the danger this President has inflicted on an already torn country.

What his niece Mary said is true, Trump is dangerous because he is utterly amoral, he has no better angel to answer to. His actions are all for him, not the country.

It is the good fortune of the country that he is so incompetent as being an autocrat and delusional. While much the country burns and sickens, he’s touting his cognitive test and calling attention to his age.

The country is now locked into an escalating cycle of violence –  by the police, against the police.

Our history is full of moments like this. America has always had a violent and deeply repressive strain in law enforcement and government.

The police have often been used in our country – as have federal authorities – to suppress “radicals” and blacks and Communists and Socialists and Native-Americans, and striking laborers and the poor.

The police have always been used to suppress speech and protest at different times and in different ways, many brutal.

There just weren’t millions of cell phones to capture every act.

Just as the George Floyd video awakened us to the depth and pain of racism, images like the nurse getting peppered sprayed in her face in  Seattle awaken us to the abuse of power and the great danger of turning our police into Star Wars Troopers.

This is the worst possible corruption of the police. They are supposed to know us, and live in and around our communities and towns. They are supposed to be us.

Their militarizing of the police distance them from us and transforms them into alien invaders whose faces are never seen. Even those Alabama racists with their dogs showed their faces and wore their name tags.

What the Homeland Security troops are telling us is that those true conservatives, now driven from the Republican Party, were right in warning against too much federal power.

This uniformed thugs thought they were beating back the civil rights movement, but they made it successful. Nothing kills demagogues and dictators more than being shown in the light.

And images of police gassing moms and nurses is the dumbest way I can imagine to win an election.

In return for this new militarized policing,  citizens like those protesters in Portland have stopped seeing their police as human beings and fellow citizens but as something dangerous and foreign – droids following orders, even if the requests are unjust.

It was an awful thing on many levels for President Trump to have done, and it is another self-destructive move that is already blowing up in his face. Instead of bringing order, he is bringing chaos, anger, and destruction.

He forgets again and again that only a few million people watch Fox News, everybody else is seeing a very different kind of truth and wondering what has happened to their country.

This is the damage President Trump is doing to America right now, even to the point of celebrating it. He is tearing apart the fabric, loose but real, that binds us together.

In city after city, the police are being assaulted, provoked, taunted, and injured by rocks, fireworks, even small explosive devices.  And protesters are being beaten, gassed, sprayed, shot with hard rubber bullets,  hit with batons, and knocked to the ground.

Violence does breed violence, and it accomplished little. Gandhi and King and Mandela knew that.

President Trump has succeeded in provoking a manufactured crisis – and largely fake – crisis so he can point to continuing violence and disorder as a crisis and then claim to be the only person who can stop it.

Even his supporters are acknowledging in polls that he is politicizing the demonstrations – some violent – that have wracked the country since the death of George Floyd.

He does not see this as being for a reckoning of racism in America that needs healing and dialogue, but as a plot by his political opponents to make him look bad.

That is a shame. For the first time in a long time, the whole country was talking about slavery and it’s dread legacy. The President is making sure they are talking about other things now.

Yesterday, he told reporters that he was set to deploy 75,000 federal agents into American cities to quell what he called “out-of-control” violence in Democratic cities.  But there are only 100,000 federal agents, and they have a lot of other work to do.

He is not sending federal combat agents into cities with Republican Mayors who support him.

Journalists and civil leaders in Portland say the protests, many violent, were quieting and coming under control there until the federal agents in combat gear showed up as part of the Presidents’ very transparent political effort to project strength.

I don’t believe this will work much better than anything he has done this year has worked. This is a leader who can’t admit mistakes and lacks empathy for anyone else who suffers.

He is full of grievance and blinding self-pity while so many people are sick, dying, or living gravely disrupted lives.

What they are worried about is keeping themselves and their children safe, they aren’t paying too much attention to his increasingly desperate distractions.

The grandchildren and children of dead Covid-19 victims are sending out videos all over the country, asking why their grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers had to die while their President insisted there was nothing to worry about. He promised three times that the virus would just soon “disappear.”

I don’t think the country will soon forget that, no matter how many federal agents are moved around the country.

Our quiet and shy nurse has meanwhile worked her place into the history of the time. She has given us one of the most powerful images of our tim