No, it is impossible. Protesters don’t seal off an expressway with cars whizzing past them. Every attack I’ve seen on the news was from a lone car buzzing down an area totally cleared of people and then entering the crowd. Well, except for the times police vans started up from the middle and went through people.
I’d need to see evidence of this “couldn’t stop on time” incident to know what went on there. But even if that happened once, the reality is that protesters don’t put themselves into harm’s way by these symbolic shutdowns; murderers go out of their way to kill or harm them. There are not two equal sides in this.
I don’t know what you are arguing. I said that Charlottesville was not impossible, to which you responded, “No, it is impossible.”
Okay, so I looked into it. Apparently I was thinking of the Seattle incident, where the driver, who is black, claimed it was a terrible accident. However, he had to enter an exit ramp to drive the wrong way on the interstate and then maneuver past blocking vehicles in order to strike the pedestrians, so maybe I can’t take his word on that.
Yes, murderers are going out of their way to kill or harm protestors. This seems to be virally spreading since Charlottesville, and I have to wonder if it was partially inspired by the ISIS attacks of the same method.
I don’t know what tactics are used by protestors entering interstate highways illegally to block traffic. If they are using cars to create roadblocks, then that is a bit safer than just marching out onto the highways, which seemed to be the approach I was familiar with.
So if strategies have changed, that’s an improvement. I still disagree with the message those protests are conveying, whatever message is intended. Blocking traffic to inconvenience and frustrate drivers does not garner sympathy for the plight of people being mistreated by racist policies and actions. Visibility can be valuable, but the audience has to be able to make the connection between the protest action and the message. Irritating and frustrating people seems more likely to foster a dismissive attitude towards the cause than sympathy. “Those Black Lives Matter assholes are at it again.”
I’m with Irishman on this. Stop fucking with cars. Stop fucking with trucks. Stop fucking with traffic. Don’t get in front of moving cars. Don’t jump on them. Leave vehicles the fuck out of this.
I haven’t seen the statistics but assuming that polling data is true, as a member of Gen-X, I’m also surprised and dismayed, and yet not that surprised.
Our generation is more progressive than the Boomers and Silent Generation, but not as progressive as millennials, Gen-Zers (or are they called digital natives?). We grew up with Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. We’re probably the last generation that came of age during the time of the archetypal white male executive. Despite being the first generation that grew up in the post-civil rights era, it’s an era in which whites, particularly white males, we still grew up at a time when the boundaries of civil rights were getting worked out. We’re progressive but not nearly as ‘woke’ as successive generations. This is just my perception, but it almost seems like many of my fellow Gen-Xers seem resistant to being ‘woke,’ as if that’s going too far.
Perhaps part of the tension lies in the fact that people my age, who should be at the height of their earning power, have been punched in the gut with two severe recessions and lived through 20 years of wealth and income inequality not seen since about, oh, 1913. It was promised the American dream, but more and more data are showing that they are killing themselves off at alarming rates due to deaths of despair.
My guess is that it’s Republicans who are disgusted by Trump but who would never consider voting D starting to admit that they will vote for Trump rather than claiming to be undecided.
I’m a younger millennial, and my observation is that the biggest gap between millenials and Gen-X is that Gen-X tends to have the mentality of “it’s supposed to work a certain way, so why is everything broken” whereas millennials think the way things are supposed to work is bullshit in the first place.
I don’t think millennials think there is an American dream at all, and most people my age have little to no optimism about the future. A lot of people my age think they will never retire. The recession was a really important first impression many of us made with politics, and the context that older generations have of the economy being capable of long periods of growth, isn’t something millennials have actually lived with. I think another major factor is that we’re probably the first generation that didn’t see globalization and automation transform the economy - the way the economy works now is just normal for us.
I think this is why ideologies like socialism are getting more popular with them, why they tend to take climate change more seriously, and I also think it’s why millenials are more likely to believe that Trump actually wants to make himself a dictator and could get away with it.
On a personal level I obviously can’t escape my own perception to make this observation, but I think the older generations are using a lot of life experience to try to explain the world now that isn’t very useful any more. Relative to most of the world throughout most of history, America had it really, really good between WWII and the 2000’s. I know personally my grandparents had to see the world and their own lives completely change due to the depression, the holocaust and WWII, then my parents got to live in a “normal” world and have the ability to contextualize the financial crash and the authoritarian direction the US has gone with what happened before. I don’t have that as something I actually lived through, so I just look at that time period as a bizarre anomaly that I probably won’t experience.
I’m not convinced that the point of protests is to garner sympathy at all. I mean, that would be good, but I have the idea that protest is all about sending messages to people in power.
So, in some protests, the goal is to send the message “look how many of us think this! Align with us now and be more popular!”
But in other protests the message is just “listen to us now or we’ll break your shit, and keep breaking it until you listen!”
It’s all well and good for the uninvolved to ho-hum and say they’d like the protesters much better if they stopped being such inconveniences and allowed people to ignore them better, but sometimes the protest isn’t about you.
This is same old song that’s been sung since before the American Revolution. Sure, go ahead and protest, but do so in such a way that I can completely ignore you. That doesn’t work. It’s never worked.
True, the assholes would scream about being inconvenienced but the hope is that more decent people will see what they’ve been missing. Polls say that’s exactly what’s been happening.
I think your observations and commentary are pretty much spot on and consistent with what I’ve felt, too.
I think you’re onto something about Gen-X (well, white Gen-X anyway). My sense is that white Gen-X might be the last generation that believed in the American dream and that naive belief that anyone can bootstrap their way out of a jam. Although we’re probably more progressive when it comes to things like gay rights and civil rights, we were probably slower to embrace transgender issues. We value higher education, but we’re also likely to complain about how academia has become a social minefield.
I don’t blame you for lacking optimism about the future - I don’t have much myself. I just finished paying off my higher ed debt, but I’m in my 40s; people in their 20s and 30s are just getting started and now they’re getting gut-punched with two major recessions within the last 10 years. People in their late 50s are going to get shoved into retirement, whatever that means, but a lot of people under the age of 30 are going to be worried about creditors for years. And people who are on the bubble might have a long future of moving from shelter to shelter.
But I’m receiving a message, too, and that message is “We’re going to break and take your shit.” And my response is at least as important to our dear leaders as the protests, and that response might not be “Fix this!”, it might be “Save me!”
If your protest encourages people to accept or even demand more authoritarianism, isn’t that counterproductive?
I don’t want to live in the world Donald Trump envisions, and my eyes have been opened to the ongoing injustices, but by videos that film incidents, not crowds shutting down interstates. That just pisses me off, and I don’t think I’m an asshole. (Of course, assholes rarely recognize they are assholes, but still.)
I don’t figure that protests are the most precise message-sending approach in existence - particularly when any random person can wander in and start sending their own message (which becomes your message). The most critical thing about a protest is that it gets noticed. An unnoticed protest sends no message at all. So the first and most important step is to be noticeable.
And while writing my last paragraph, something occurred to me, about protest messaging. One of the big problems that the recent protests have had regarding messaging has been criminals and racists coming in and looting and vandalizing, either for their own gain or to deliberately change the message.
I imagine it’s pretty damned hard to loot a freeway. So in the event that the thoughts on messaging are going beyond “people are going to pay attention to this, dammit!”, perhaps that played into the equation. The places that people care about can basically be boiled down to “Where we live, where we work, where we shop, and the ways we get from one to the other,” and of those four places, three of them are pretty promising targets for looting and vandalism.
Shooting random people in the head will accomplish that goal, too, but I don’t advocate that strategy, either.
To me, there needs to be a balance between getting noticed and what you want noticed. If the goal is to draw attention to a cause - any cause - the method needs to be compatible with the cause. Extreme enough to get attention, but not so extreme to get you dismissed as terrorists like al queda.
I don’t have a problem with marching around the government buildings and police stations, carrying signs, staging sit ins. Blocking off city streets around those buildings, or holding rallies and mall parking lots is fine. Setting up marches through the street, great. Kneeling during the national anthem, hell, let me join you.
Blocking off interstates to me is a step from “pay attention to me” to “I’m an asshole”. Obviously, YMMV.
So, just to be clear, you explicitly think that blocking off a freeway can be legitimately and reasonably equated, without hyperbole, with shooting people in the head.
You think that blocking off a freeway can be legitimately and reasonably described, without hyperbole, as being as extreme as the actions of terrorists like al queda.
You said the most important thing was to get noticed. I was pointing out that there are limits to what is acceptable that even you would agree to.
I say that blocking off interstates is without hyperbole is being an asshole.
I say that routing, looting, taking over police stations and creating “autonomous zones”, and hurling water bottles and rocks at police is closer to insurrection than peaceful protest.
Most effective processing involves being an asshole in some way or another. I do admit that blocking a freeway is a very efficient way of being an asshole, in terms of ‘clients served’. But again it may have benefits on the ‘avoid agitators doing insurrection on your behalf’ front, perhaps among other things.
@Irishman, again the proper response is that these protests aren’t about you. They are not bothering to take your opinion into account. They really couldn’t could less about you and your thoughts about what the only right and proper ways to protest are.
The proof that they are right and you are wrong is in the results. People across the country are joining the protests. Protests are being held not just in the large cities with large minority populations but in scores of small towns and suburbs with overwhelmingly white populations. Protesters are of all ages, all skin tones, all genders, all occupations. The vast majority of protests are completely peaceful. They are a force for good.
Can some of the actions be counter-productive? Of course. If so, the protesters, who have continued their protests for weeks and months in all defiance of the normal short-term enthusiasm for such demonstrations, are very likely to have learned what works and what doesn’t. If that means reducing highway blockages they’ll do that. If those are effective, they’ll do more. Short of giving each protester across the country a laminated 3x5" card listing what you think they are allowed to do and not do in accordance with your sensibilities, I can’t imagine what more you would want.
The message that Trump and his Republican cronies are responding to is “Stop them from breaking our shit,” not “Listen to us.”
If you want people in office who will listen to you, you need to win over a majority of the electorate.
It is my opinion that repeated incidents of racial injustice being broadcast on the news is far more influential in building support for continued peaceful protests than marchers blocking highways. It is my opinion that Trump and his cronies are trying their hardest to overcome the counterproductive elements of the BLM protests.
Yeah, I know, my opinion doesn’t matter. I thought this website was for us to share our opinions. But I keep getting told I am wrong.
Actually think what Trump and co get from the protests is “Sweet, a chance to attack american citizens in order to justify even more totalitarianism!” But the message is probably aimed at the non-sociopathic politicians and governors and mayors, and in any case Trump sees human targets in any protest, no matter how peaceful.
I don’t believe this to be true.
Trump and cronies love the counterproductive parts of the protests, because they don’t want the protests to be productive. They’re racist authoritarians, remember? They don’t think lives matter. If you think Trumpco is looking out for you (or anyone), he has a bridge he’s sold you.
There is no part of having an opinion that obligates anybody else to agree with it. That is not how opinions work.
