8 Minutes and 46 Seconds Is a Long Goddamn Time

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

05 June 20

The memorial for George Floyd, killed in the street by Minneapolis police, brought home the gravity and the horror.

et us be truthful. Eight minutes and 46 seconds is a long goddamn time. It’s more than a minute and a half longer than anyone ever has run 3,000 meters, more than a minute and a half longer than anyone has swum 800 meters, and two and a half minutes longer than anyone has skated 5,000 meters. Try to hold your breath for 8:46. Now imagine doing it with a boot on the back of your neck and your face ground into asphalt. You would be dead.

That was the most moving part of the extraordinary memorial service conducted in Minneapolis on Thursday for George Floyd, killed in the street by members of that city’s police department. It came at the end, after all the glorious singing and the eulogy from the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the touching, homey reminiscences from the members of Lloyd’s family, particularly his brother, Polonius.

I remember nights when the day before school, we did not have a washing machine, so we were—we would all go in and put our socks and underwear in the bathroom sink and started washing them and we did not have detergent. We would use soap. We were going to be clean. We would literally right after that, we would take the socks and hang them over the hot water heater we would take the underwear and hang them and we would fight about it. You did it last night. Your clothes would still be damp if you did not put it—your clothes would still be damp if you did not put it on the water heater. We learned a lot of stuff. We did not have a dryer so the fastest way to dry your clothes was to put it in the oven. I loved my brother, man.

And then, eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence in which we could all reflect on the life of George Floyd, an American killed by other Americans because that’s what Americans have done to those other, involuntary “Americans” since the first ship docked in 1619. The 8:46 clock started ticking at that moment, and it’s still ticking in the silence that has hung like an iron curtain over the country’s streets. 

Listen. You can hear it ticking, especially if you don’t breathe.