Lots of protests, lots of people willing to go out and disrupt cities and force the state to listen. Great! I know Americans suffer under a fascist police state, commit genocides, underfund public services, ooh - they have a shitty bourgeois democratic system, maybe they’re protesting to fix that, or maybe they’re demanding free healthcare, that’s long overdue. No, I know, it’ll be about the insane amount of school shootings, or serious police violence. I know the LA riots started against ICE, that’s cool, so maybe they’re protesting for actually fair justice! That’d be a step forward.
Whatever they’re protesting, they seem to be in huge numbers, so they’ll probably make an actual effort to disrupt things. Occupy buildings. You know, some sort of direct action, they can’t all stand around pointlessly. Anyway, enough anticipation let’s go look and find out
Oh, the protests are just “Trump bad” in another form. And they’re decrying all forms of violence. And the police are literally collaborating with some. Oh.
Americans really took all these years of mistreatment, fascism, genocide with their tax dollars, deliberately being made poorer year after year, violent suppression, being allowed to die in droves, and the mass culmination of that is… “trump bad, also be polite while saying it”??? And then the protests are used as an excuse to tighten the fascism.
I can’t wrap my head around it. Millions(?) of people coming out to protest, and the overwhelming demand is ‘replace orange man with another genocidal fascist pls’. ie. basically for nothing to change whatsoever.
At least leftists try to get the fucking goods. Lib organising is the worst.
EDIT: I’mma just be clear - protesting ICE is extremely cool and not the part I’m complaining about.
The one near me had a really huge turnout and was blocking traffic all over the lib’est area during peak brunch hours, so that’s kind of funny. Saw tables for food not bombs, some worker thing associated with Kshama Sawant, and a bunch of people wearing local DSA chapter shirts. Lots of Palestinian flags too. Some people I talked to had earlier in the day been protesting a potential future ICE facility in a nearby town with immigrant rights groups and prison abolitionists. These protests aren’t going to change anything and we have to stop centering nonviolence as the highest virtue. But it seems like a good thing that people are meeting and talking to each other in physical reality… anything that defies the gravitational pull of social media.
But absolutely don’t let libs use this little afternoon field trip as a chance to pat themselves on the back. More people go to sports bars to watch the football game every week.
Hell yeah, that’s cool. Definitely not saying it’s entirely fruitless to go out there, just that the meat of them were extremely misdirected.