The American leviathan swimming in the turbulent economic-political waters needs a Mark Chagall of our time to artistically decipher its image.

The agility of America is stunning.  At will, it can stop its enormous — the world's largest — economy under the threat of COVID-19, and at will, it can restart it again, with a bang like the pop of a champagne cork.  How else can one describe the recent unemployment drop and Dow rise in an almost V-shaped reversal after a deep economic/employment "kneeling" in the face of that invisible enemy?

The robust American economy is not the only one that can perform such a comeback trick — many of its people can, too.  A few days ago, Jacob Frey, the liberal mayor of Minneapolis, took a "knee" at the coffin of a man who died while in police custody, George Floyd.  Why he and other officials like him did not kneel or even mourn at the death of black police captain David Dorn from St. Louis, or other police officers killed by rampaging "protesters," is another question.  Still, Frey demonstrated a little character when he resisted the irrational calls to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

In addition, what about the captain of that leviathan called America, President Trump?  By watching him through clouds of smoke at last week's pogrom-style protests, I saw a prophetic image.  This impression was underscored by his sober posture while walking toward a burning church with a Bible in his hands.  This vision resonates with the images of Moses, holding up the tablets of the Ten Commandments and facing his wayward followers, in the famous paintings of Marc Chagall.  Among these symbolic images, there is also a place to honor the police officers, the selfless public servants, the overwhelming majority of whom will be there to help you and save you in critical situations.  I have learned that experience a number of times.

In our humdrum daily life, as the world hustles and bustles around us, we oftentimes take for granted the unenviable but vital job of our police brothers; we tend to forget about the multiple challenges of the police profession that is disproportionally associated with the risk to life.  In NYC, because of the latest riots, nearly 750 police were injured, some severely.  While some corrections in the modus operandi of the police force may be overdue, they will probably have little effect on the black-on-black violence in some neighborhoods that even per leading black figures such as Shelby Steele from Stanford University or civil rights attorney Leo Terrell and others is the predominant source of black homicides.  The grim statistics show that 96% of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks.  Specifically, per this study, there were almost 6,000 blacks killed by other blacks in 2015.  By contrast, only 258 blacks were killed by police gunfire that year.

The lives of police officers and their "customers" will be less safe if the cabal of leftists and extremists of various hues prevail in defunding police departments.

Val Dunaevsky, Ph.D., MSME  is the author of the biographical/autobiographical memoir A Daughter of the 'Enemy of the People' (Xlibris, 2018) about life in the USSR in the middle of the last century.