Steven J Levine
"I’m sitting on my porch looking over at Lake Street and watching a continuous parade in both directions of people carrying brooms and dustbins and garbage bags and buckets, heading off to do cleanup. I’ve seen many families, everybody masked. Hundreds of citizen volunteers.
I hope my friends outside the city know that the arson and targeted infrastructure destruction was a coordinated attack from outsiders - anarchists, anti-government cults, white supremacists, using the protests for their own terrorist activities. We saw the targeting on Thursday, throughout the city, of pharmacies. And food stores. And, oddly, auto parts stores. From my own porch I’ve seen two days of souped up cars and trucks speeding noisily around, out of state plates when I can discern them.
There is at this point no place to purchase food or pharmaceuticals for many miles in all directions, at a time when there is no public transit. Most streetfront businesses in my immediate neighborhood are burned to the ground or otherwise destroyed, it being a targeted minority neighborhood.
So please stop lumping the outside agitators with “the protesters”. Listen to our own police chiefs who have pointed this out.
In the meantime it’s a beautiful cool sunny morning and the stream of locals carrying brooms is unending."
