Serious question: What just happened?

What is reality? To whom does it belong? What role does time play in refashioning reality?

It's rare that a front-page news article stimulates existential musings for me, but the July 14 report on Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill's response to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's most recent memo to him on the George Floyd murder case was an exception. All of the questions above are generated by this exchange.

For those who have been living underground with the hobbits for the past year, the exchange between Cahill and Ellison concerned a request from the state to delete comments from the judge's sentencing memorandum regarding whether or not four young eyewitnesses were traumatized at the murder scene. The judge responded that the court "neither found nor wrote" that the four minors who witnessed Floyd's murder "were not traumatized. What the court wrote was that 'the evidence at trial did not present any objective indicia of trauma.' "

The differences between the judge's view of events and the attorney general's view extends even over how to describe the four young (all agree on that!) witnesses' status in life: Cahill describes the three, who are 17, as "young women"; Ellison insists they are "girls."

But here's my concern: Not only do the judge and the attorney general disagree about the young females, and about the relative importance of their laughter as they videotaped Floyd's tragic encounter or their visible tears in their later court appearance, but they also disagree on the role that the young females' appearance played in the trial. Ellison charged that the judge's sentencing memo contributed to the "diminution of trauma" of young Black girls, whereas Cahill noted that the video presented at trial showed Black, white and Hispanic young women.

The entire exchange brought to mind the fragile and fungible nature of memory, of affect and, yes, of reality itself. This case and its aftermath present the best example possible of the malleability of human recollection and interpretation. The very definition of malleability is "able to be hammered, able to be fashioned, adaptability." And here we have it in abundance.

To illuminate the problem, let us ask the key questions here: (1) What was actually happening at the scene of Floyd's murder? (2) What was known later? (3) What was presented at trial?

(2) Later, we understood that Floyd had died at the scene. The video of the encounter taken by one of the younger females went viral. Much journalistic ink was spilled over the tragedy. Riots were generated. The scene took on more somber tones in retrospect.

(3) At the trial several of the young females "broke into tears on the witness stand," according to the news summary.

Now, let us return to the original questions. What is reality? Was it the actual scene? Was it the video representation? Was it all the news coverage? Was it the witnesses on the stand? Is reality the interpretation of Judge Cahill (the "young women" version) or is it that of Attorney General Ellison (the "traumatized girls" version)?

I do not have a definitive answer to any of these questions. I suspect there is some kernel of truth to all points of view here. That the girls/young women were both; that the frivolity at the scene contained some elements of excitement for them and later of sadness and regret; that both the judge and the key law officer for the state have some measure of reality in their interpretations.

We argue and contest, present "sides" and opinions while deriding those of our opponents, choose one version over another. But the truth is much more complex and dangerous. We are all George Floyd and we are all Judge Cahill and Attorney General Ellison. And we are all the changeable girls/young women. We are all part of this tragedy.