Um…I’m genuinely curious here, but how do football players fit into your narrative of the difference between civil rights protesters (clean cut, hard working, etc) and OWS (dirty hippies)? Aren’t football players generally attractive, rich, fit young men playing a game developed in the US (and almost exclusively played in the US from what I can tell) and watched by a large percentage of the population? I mean, I guess baseball is THE American sport (right?), but football is up there as well.
(Full disclosure, I have never been a football fan and don’t really see the appeal, but then I don’t watch any sports so I don’t generally get it wrt this stuff)
One thing that seems to help the cause is when the protestors are treated badly by the authorities. When people in the whole of the US saw Civil Rights protestors set upon by police dogs and fire hoses, the protestors (and their cause) became much more immediate and important to a lot of people who otherwise not have cared all that much. When the National Guard shot those students at Kent State, it was like a sea change had struck. Sure, there were the die-hards would think “they got what they deserved”, but they were in the minority.
And I think the White Supremacist protestors we are seeing today are purposely trying to egg on the counter protestors (Antifa, or whatever) so they look sympathetic to middle American. They need to figure out, though, that middle America isn’t particularly sympathetic to Nazis, no matter what is happening to them.
I bet that’s what you said back in the sixties, too, right? You weren’t one of the ~80% of white people who thought the protestors back then were hurting the cause of civil rights and who thought them ineffective, were you?
The football players protesting are (mostly) black and (for the time being) very well-paid. That cuts against seeing them as clean-cut or hard-working, for many. They’re “lucky duckies” who should be grateful and quit complaining. (To be clear, I’m describing, not advocating this POV.)
Good point about non-violent protesters using violence against themselves as a tool. That goes back to Gandhi, I think? The protester shows the rightness of their cause by their willingness to suffer violence, and shows the wrongness of their opponents’ by their willingness to inflict it.
The alt-right/whateverists are generally not doing traditional non-violent protest at all (even when they abstain from violence in specific cases). Showing up armed and/or armored, ready to “defend yourself,” is a whole different strategy (for a whole different ideology – I mean, a fascist/ethnonationalist society like the one these guys want is not going to embrace nonviolence as a virtue).
So, still confused here (I know it wasn’t your narrative btw). Weren’t most of the civil rights protesters black as well? And, afaik (correct me if I’m wrong), isn’t playing football pretty hard work? Don’t you have to train pretty extensively to play? I mean, you can’t just walk off the street and play on a professional team, right? As for clean cut…well, I haven’t seen a lot of football games, but I’ve seen some athletes on commercials and such and they look pretty clean cut to me, generally (though I have no idea if they play baseball, football or basketball…or even soccer or other stuff :p).
Anyway, I don’t want to hijack the thread, it just seemed an odd comparison with OWA hippies and civil rights protesters then onto football players. Maybe it’s just me.
We totally agree on evaluating the football players. One factor in favor of (others) seeing civil rights protesters as more “clean-cut” is that they were protesting 50 plus years ago. Their issue preferences are quasi-universally accepted today; they weren’t back then, as others have pointed out citing polling from the time. The consensus on the March on Washington at the time was: it’s inappropriate, and will hurt black Americans.
(And Colin K is not going to be seen as clean cut by many for another reason: he’s got a frickin’ big-ass Afro!)
That was my (probably poorly expressed) point! I was responding to someone who compared the alt-right’s tactic of inciting Antifa violence to the civil rights movement’s tactic of inciting state/white supremacist violence. I guess it’s tactically similar, but yeah – you’ll never be an effective recruiter for your Nazi* cause by being a non-violent Nazi* and getting punched repeatedly. That’s not why people want to be Nazis* – to get punched for their beliefs until they gain the moral high ground.
Bringing it up again, Occupy Wall Street has 3 interesting characteristics
a. The problems the protesters were griping about were real and affect 95% of the population. Contrast that with gay marriage, where only a small (under 5%) subset of the population is even affected. And out of the gay community, the percentage that actually want to get married is smaller still, marriage is kind of an archaic and not so great legal contract to sign.
b. I don’t know of a protest in modern times that had people actually camping for months or protesting on the scale that they did.
c. Nothing has been changed. Income inequality has steadily grown worse at the same or accelerating rate it was at before OWS. Hell, right now, the economy has finally recovered and there’s low unemployment, but wages are still flat. You can get a job, just don’t expect to be paid more than you would have made in 1978 for a comparable position.
d. **None **of the folks responsible for their get rich scheme blowing up and taking the entire global economy down have gone to jail.
Thing is that income inequality - and methods to change it - is a much much more complex issue than gay marriage. So it’s much harder to do anything about it.
…but “other forces” are always at work. Were the protests the sum-total of the civil rights movement? Or were other forces at work there as well?
Most of those hundreds of thousands of phone calls were part of a co-ordinated protest campaign that ramped up as each attempt at “repeal and replace” came close to the vote, that included people ringing multiple times reading off scripts (that were provided by protest organisers.) with the intent of overwhelming the phone lines of the senators that they targeted. This “mainstream political process” fits the definition of “spam” much more closely than marching on the streets.
Yes: this is part of the “mainstream political process.” But marching on the streets, holding political placards, making your voice hear is part of the “mainstream political process” as well. It always has been this way, and in lieu of a constitutional amendment that bans political protest in America, it will be part of the mainstream political process in the future as well.
What is your benchmark then? When does a protest “cross the line”?
So you think that Colin Kapernick takes the knee not because he thinks that “black lives matter”, but because he wants to “enhance his social status within a social group?”
I don’t agree with that at all.
I don’t need to rethink anything. There is nothing about an advertisement that is inherently spam. And there is nothing about a protest that is inherently spam either.
Still not spam.
Your surprised I gave an honest answer to your question?
A public protest is the mildest form of political violence, but violence should be a last resort. We, of all people, should be mindful of that, since we undertook violence of the worst kind to free ourselves from a relatively tepid form of oppression. The British treated half the world worse than they treated us. A lot worse.
Were the American colonists, as an historical fact, treated worse than we treat some of our own citizens? Do we have right to demand loyalty from such people? Don’t we tacitly admit that they have every right to resist? After all,we did.
We started shooting Redcoats over taxes and boarding soldiers in our homes. And now we are too prim and proper for some public disorder and uncouth behavior? To resist an unjust and futile war, not enough cause? To resist callous violence from men sworn to protect and serve, no good enough reason?
We note that the comfortable and secure seldom protest in an unseemly manner. But, of course. Perhaps that is the solution to the vexing problem of protest right there.
You missed one major issue. The fact that OWS was a grass roots protest and didn’t get supported by either major political party.
NO WAY would the democrats support it because at that time, their man Obama was president. However I did notice Obama scaled back his meetings with corporate leaders during this time.
Republicans wouldn’t support it because they are more of the target.
But it wasn’t enormous. Occupy Wall Street basically amounted to one big demonstration in 2011.
A big protest isn’t ONE demonstration. That’s like saying a big war is one battle. A big protest is many sustained demonstrations, constantly poking and prodding and bothering. Dr. King didn’t just do one bus boycott; organizing demonstrations, protests and the like was literally his full time job, and he was only the most prominent activist. To use the Civil Rights movement as an example, the protest was enormous because it consisted of many demonstrations, and it was sustained over years and years of effort.
OWS lasted basically a weekend. There were a few farts in the wind after, but that was it. If it was still going on today, six years later, then it would be a big protest.
