Opinion: President Trump's reaction to death of George Floyd is misplaced, mistimed and misfiring

I will admit to being bewildered as never before this week. We have just witnessed Mental Health Awareness Week... what is our collective emotional and mental state right now?

If a week is a long time in politics, it has been a lifetime for some, particularly when you consider the breadth of events which the world has witnessed in the past seven days.

On a positive note, we saw the successful launch, journey and docking of the world’s first privately funded spacecraft with the International Space Station; testament enough to mankind’s engineering capabilities, but awe inspiring when you consider that it is travelling at 17,500 miles per hour and weighs 420 tonnes.

Right now it’s mankind’s first orbiting hotel, with half a dozen separate spacecraft attached to it, including the latest arrival, the Space-X Dragon capsule, named Endeavour by its two-man crew.

Everything about its journey from blast-off to arrival has been apparently faultless, except for astronaut Doug Hurley banging his head on the ISS as he emerged from his capsule’s hatch. Bravo, Elon Musk and your team.

Eclipsing this news, though, was the death of American George Floyd, whose neck was knelt on for almost 10 minutes by US police officer Derek Chauvin.

Colour is the crux of the matter. Floyd was black, Chauvin is white.

Arrested and subsequently charged with murder, Chauvin is now being held in a maximum security jail.

The protests which immediately followed across the globe have been (and continue to be) passionate, understandable and an indication of a worldwide eruption of outraged condemnation.

Donald Trump’s reaction seems misplaced, mistimed and misfiring; his administration may yet reap the wild wind for what looks like weaponised enforcement.

In the meantime I have admired the peaceful protesters in the US who made their point without resorting to violence, explained their feelings with emphatic eloquence and even confronted looters seeking to cynically capitalise by jumping falsely on the back of ‘a cause’ until they could be turned over to the police in what must have been a powder keg moment.

All credit too to the individual police officers and state troopers of all colours who reached out – physically – to calm the situation.

The world rightly reviles what has happened in the last week. The rule of law will now be scrutinised – and judged – by what happens next. There can be no place for discrimination if we are to grow as a species. ALL lives matter.

Here, there’s been good news with the partial lifting of the lockdown, so many people having been sentenced to confinement for so long. I’m assured that the lifting is a good thing, but it’s all theory for now and it remains to be seen what we, as individuals, will do with the return of the freedoms that we have taken for granted in the past.

Fears of a selfish minority triggering a swift return to lockdown as the R number jumps from an increase in cases of Covid-19 remain to be realised, but the consequences of a devil-may-care attitude have been comprehensively flagged, and nobody can be in any doubt of the ramifications of non-compliance.

Never before has our society had to deal with something like this. It may have to deal with it for generations to come. Will sense prevail? I have no idea and for now I’m staying put in my own version of lockdown. It seems sensible.

The world seems to be in universal turmoil. I wonder what the astronauts on the International Space Station think as they ponder their eventual return to it.