I had a great professor who opened up the course by asking “What would it take to get you to take to the streets and start throwing rocks?”
I don’t remember my answer then, but I know that my answer has changed now that I am a homeowner, father, and “responsible adult”.
So, **cuauhtemoc **, what would it take to get to you to start throwing rocks in the streets?
It’s a great question, one I’m not really sure how to answer. It would be a last resort, or at least I’d like to think so.
But my country is surprising me lately. Not like “Oh my God, I had no idea!” surprised, more like “I wouldn’t have thought things were this bad.”
And I appreciate all the people saying “Relax, it’s not going to come to that,” and you’re probably all correct.
However, I think about myself, and my position in this country, and I wonder what would happen if things went the way a lot of folks seem to want them to go. I’m mostly talking about things like restrictions on religious freedom and speech, normalization of violence against POC/LGBTQ/religious minorities, etc.
All I can say, personally, is that if trends like that continue, at the very least, I won’t be all that excited about being an American. If these people (POC, LGBTQ…) aren’t considered fully American, then I don’t feel fully American either, y’know? I don’t know if my feelings translate into throwing rocks in the street, but it takes more than that for America to work. People have to believe in it and participate in it. “Not throwing rocks” isn’t enough. And if people feel they’re not full members of society, it’s a lot harder for them to believe in it and participate in it.
According to Erica Chenoweth, modern governments can’t survive if 3.5% of its population rebels against it. Readers may find that link interesting since it examines the success rate and dynamics of violent vs. non-violent rebellions and the psychology of the populace.
Whenever people talk about revolution in America I think of Crispin Sartwell’s concept of squishy totalitarianism:
I think it would take some sort of shock to the system, like an environmental or economic catastrophe, to make a sustainable violent rebellion make any sense. Certainly difficult to bury ammo in the woods and hike miles at a time when significant portions of the populace are obese. Maybe we’ll have the world’s first rascal scooter revolution.
If it were any other politician besides Trump, I think you would be right. But with Trump I’m not so sure. I don’t think he has the acumen to recognize the need to pay back favors with the hope of building and maintaining a political power base. I think his presidency would be governed by whatever he feels at the time is most likely to enrich himself, and feed his ego, whether or not it matches the desires of any of the people who brought him to power.
The country certainly has a lot of problems but there are safety nets (unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc.) for pretty much every situation for anyone with the initiative to seek out help.
So I think as long as there’s gas, food, and basic utilities people will be content enough despite lots of political and ideological disagreement.
What she said was that any nonviolent protest which reaches the point where 3.5% of the population has joined it, has always succeeded.
I think what she’s describing is more like an example of the tail wagging the dog. It’s not that a non-violent movement of a certain size is guaranteed to topple any regime. It’s that a regime which allows a non-violent protest to grow past a certain size is capable of being toppled.
The reason the Soviet Union fell and the People’s Republic of China survived was because Deng shot protesters and Gorbachev didn’t. Potential protesters in both countries saw what was happening. In the Soviet Union, they felt safe and joined the movement - and the 3.5% was eventually reached. In China, they were intimidated and stayed home - and the movement didn’t reach the 3.5% threshold. But in neither case did the 3.5% threshold decide the issue. Whether it was reached or not was just a reflection of the crucial difference that had already occurred.
I don’t think the sides are as clearly defined as you suggest. I interact with a fairly diverse group of folks and I always find that the heated opinions voiced by politicos and pundits are much more nuanced and muted in reality. It’s easy just to shout and say crazy things but when you actually talk to people you often find that they have very rational concerns.
You would need more of a clear geographic division. . . like if a State tried to violently succeed based upon some extremely heated issue, and some other States followed.
Throwing rocks is basically throwing a temper tantrum, the way a three year-old demands that Mommy and Daddy acknowledge how unfairly they’re treating him. The real question is “What would it take to get you to take to the streets and start shooting police and troops?”
Though as marshmallow quoted from Crispin Sartwell, under “squishy totalitarianism”, it’s unlikely that either a crackdown or a rebellion is likely these days. And it occurs to me that that explains a lot about the alt-right, their rhetoric and apocalyptic thinking. In a manner of speaking, they wish the government would crackdown and give them someone to shoot at. For while the totalitarianism might be squishy, it is nonetheless a system in which the individual is all but helpless. Effectively, people live their lives at the mercy of the system. The banks decide whether to honor your paycheck, the corporations and advocates of globalization decide whether your job will be moving to China or India, the DMV decides whether you can drive down the road or not, And in a sense it would actually be comforting if all of that was a plot by conspirators working to place the world under socialism; instead, it’s happening simply by default as the world grows more interconnected and interdependent. No wonder something as well-meant and comparatively innocuous as the Affordable Care Act gets denounced as socialized medicine which will lead to death panels.
Particularly disturbing is Sartwell’s observation that there’s little or no functional reason left why people should have liberty. One can easily envision a quasi-dystopian world run by a government that is somewhere between Britain’s and China’s in terms of autonomy from public opinion.
I think you can safely parse “throwing rocks in the streets” as any sort of violent protest against the powers-that-be.
It might make an interesting OP in and of itself.
There is another, lower hurdle to cross, and that’s what it would take to make people start throwing rocks (or shooting) other citizens. Not policemen, but their neighbors.
The abortion debate brought about a few examples (not many, thank God!) of this kind of rebellion: the fire-bombing of health clinics and the shooting of doctors. How much would it have taken for this to grow into a large-scale wave of terror?
I’ve seen references to vandalism of cars bearing Obama bumper-stickers. No idea how often that has happened: probably not very. But if that got swept up into a major pattern of property-damage, it would be a sign of a dangerous civil disintegration.
Here in Texas, there are actual, real people who talk about secession. Even our former governor (and Dancing With the Stars star) advocated secession, at least in word, if not deed.
And that’s the thing: when do the words become deeds? In Arizona, words became deeds and shot Rep. Giffords in the head. Secession in Texas will surely fail (Fort Hood, anyone? Dyess AFB?), but at what cost?
This is not something I’m really worried about, but I don’t like the way lies become facts in today’s discourse. If you tell the Big Lie enough, people believe it. How long before people turn their belief into action? For nearly eight years, we’ve heard that Obama was born in Kenya and is not a legitimate President. We’ve heard how he has wiped his ass with the Constitution and ruined the country. Trump waxed poetic about it for ninety minutes at his convention. None of the dystopia that Trump described exists, but a lot of people believe it does exist, just over the horizon. Trump has laid the groundwork for delegitimizing a Clinton election. When will the people who believe the Big Lie turn to action? What will they do?
Ah, geez. I mean, first I guess I’d have to find some rocks. The streets are cleaned every week here, so there’s not a lot just available for the taking. This revolutioning sure was easier when streets were cobbled.
This is what I’m talking about.
The social pressure we bring to bear against that kind of speech usually takes the form of us saying “That’s irresponsible, unpatriotic…” blah blah blah.
But we fail to exert any social pressure on people to stand by their words - or more precisely, to only say words they’re willing to stand by. It’s the fact that you can say “We have to break stuff in the name of liberty!”, encourage other people to break stuff, and then not have to actually break any stuff yourself. If we started demanding that armchair revolutionaries “Put up or shut up,” maybe they’d be more deliberate in their speech. Maybe they’d say “Oh, what I really meant was that I disagree with President Obama’s policy of…”
And if they didn’t start talking more like the adults they’re supposed to be, they’d lose credibility; people would see that they’re all talk and stop paying attention to them.
But like I said upthread, at least some of those people really would start breaking stuff. So it’s risky.
Reassertion of Federal law concerning marijuana legalization … that’s about the only thing that could realistically be done to get me into the streets … although my right shoulder is messed up and throwing rocks left-handed for me would probably hit me more often then the guy in front of me.
I’d put up a nasty sign in my front yard and fly a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
Seriously? You have a pretty stereotypical view of gun owners.
Yeah, it turns out that half of all guns in America are owned by 3% of gun owners. The gun nuts, as it were. When people talk about how many guns there are, there are lots of people with a pistol or a rifle, and then there are a few gun nuts who have dozens.
The problem with that is that one guy can only shoot one cop at a time. It doesn’t do much good to have 20 rifles unless you have 20 friends you can arm with them.
And when you and the guys on your side start shooting cops, what happens? You think your family and neighbors are going to quietly support you? Or are they going to call the FBI and turn you in?
The people are the sea that the revolutionary swims in, as Mao famously said. Revolutionaries without popular support cannot survive.
I don’t buy that - Loughner was sufficiently mentally ill that any similarity between his delusions and political rhetoric is coincidental at best.
Emphases Mine
Whoa whoa whoa … why are we shooting cops here? The cops are going to be on our side, whatever cause for revolution is going to apply to them as well. Believe me, the FBI and CIA are going to know all about us long before the shooting starts. This starts out as peaceful protest, within the law. Then the protests will turn violent, coast to coast news coverage. The People will agree with us and start screaming at their congressmen. Some moron in the Pentagon gets the bright idea of carpet bombing these protest hot-spots …
Extremely unlikely, but if it does get to that point, the police will be on our side.
So…just like Black Lives Matter? And when the violence starts, the people just wake up and see the violence inherent in the system? Or…do they blame the protesters? And when the cops start busting heads, do they not just stand aside, but cheer on the cops?
My only point is, when the right wing Trump voters start shooting cops, they’re going to find out that for some reason The American People don’t like it when you shoot cops. And the American People are going to cheer when the FBI goes all Waco/Ruby Ridge on them.
Since your example is something that has an incident rate of about one a year for bombings and four a year for fires, and just a 11 deaths and 17 attempted murders have arisen from it in total over the past 40 years across the US and Canada, a whole lot more. More people have been killed in US movie theaters in the past five years than have at abortion clinics in forty.
I’m a little hazy on this idea of the Republican Party starting to shoot cops. That’s not their style, infiltration is more their game, having cops be members of the Republican Party. What’s there not to like about the “law and order” plank.