One of my friends is very proud to have been arrested during a BLM riot. Flash bangs, tear gas, all that. Now he brings it up as some sort of arguing point: “YEA WELL WHERE WERE YOU?”
So they all got arrested and had to stay outside all night while being held. Today im talking to him and he claims they changed alot. He brought up “all those convictions” but only one cop was convicted last year while over 200 were killed. Then he mentioned Aubery who was murdered in Alabama, but they were private citizens not cops, and there was literally video of the murder. Naturally he didn’t seem to take that fact well.
Defunding didnt happen much either. Is this just a liberal brain trying to convince themselves theyve done something useful? Because nothing really changed after they dragged Bernie away either.
if it helps, they also think only red fascism has existed and theres never been a successful communist country.
I got to throw a brick at a pig.
:brick-police:
In all seriousness:
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People of color asked for our support and the rest of the left answered. I used my body as a shield multiple times to protect my black comrades and I will do it again.
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It was a potentially revolutionary moment and had to be treated as such.
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It radicalized a lot of progressives and turned them into leftists quick. The boot of the state come at you instinctually makes you bare your fangs in a very visceral way. The fight is real and a lot of people previously privileged enough to be sheltered saw it first hand.
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The only way we win is if we fight. We will not win every time we fight, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try. “We only have to be lucky once, they have to be lucky every time.”
Any concessions we got from the beast are icing in my opinion. I have zero faith in the government.
Really simple. If you were a materially well off white liberal who wasn’t rich enough to think you were above police retaliation, you stayed inside, avoided putting any kind of action towards your beliefs, avoided any situation where you might have to test and reinforce said beliefs, and wrote off the riots as meaningless because they meant you would have to go outside and actually do something as a leftist other than posting on a forum or participating in glorified reading groups.
There’s no excuse for not taking action to defend lives unless you’re physically unable.
Unorganized, unchanneled rage strikes/protests happened all the time in tsarist Russia and the Bolsheviks were at every single one they could be at. It took dozens before the fruit bore
I went out but there was just nowhere for me to be. I live in a big city, but there just wasn’t much organization happening at all. Everyone in my town is just tired and depressed all the time and couldn’t muster enough energy to do much. There were protests over maybe 2 days, but the pigs didn’t do anything in retaliation except stand around. Even then the biggest protests were maybe a hundred, two hundred people at most. I did hand out some food to the homeless and try to talk to some everyday folk about what was going on. I got a single lib to agree to read Frantz Fanon.
I tried.
Outside of putting Chauvin in prison there was some growing pressure and public resentment against cops, but once dems got into power they quickly turned on BLM and joined hands with republicans in giving police everything they wanted. 1/6 was the perfect counter to the summer of 2020, liberals QUICKLY forgot all the documented nasty shit cops had done in tripping over themselves to congratulate them on being the protectors of democracy.
exactly, we’re back where we are started. anyone who thinks they changed something by getting abused by cops and not fighting back is a fool. Sure cop convictions are now up to like 1 or 2 a year, but thats been happening for a while.
struggles are always on-going with an ebb and a flow. the victories those protests made were rolled back but that’s not really the whole story. first, those protests were an expression of class rage and they found outlet and support through a network of tiny protest organizations around the country - medics, de-escalators, marshals, caregivers, etc.; these orgs exist in every city. those orgs got an influx of new members and much needed cash. that’s not a small permanent gain. it means that the next time things heat up, our organizations are better suited to being a vehicle for the expression of that rage. a lot of the failures of the movement in '20 came down to the fact that the vast majority of the people on the streets had literally just joined the left and consequently lacked all political education. now anarchist & MLM orgs are each talking about how to do political education, so the influx of new people doesn’t cause the same collapse in energy we saw last time.
so no, I don’t think just being there and getting arrested is worth pride. but there’s a lot of good work and sorely needed fresh blood that came out of 2020.
I don’t want to diminish what the protestors did that summer, they did good work, but it stopped with Chauvin’s conviction and Biden getting into the white house. Like you said, all that work has been undone and we’re back to square one.
congratulate them on being the protectors of democracy.
Which is so bizarre because I remember the discourse at the time even libs were calling the cops complicit and saying rightly that they opened the god damn barricades for the mob. I swear liberals have the memory capacity of a goldfish, how did they seemingly forget that?? We watched it happen!
It was a flare-up, the strongest in fifty years. It wouldn’t have happened without the previous flare-up in 2016, and we’ll see what happens in the next few months/years.
Sometimes things are hard to trace, but I think one lasting effect is that a majority of people in the country now believe, one way or another, that our current state of affairs is untenable.
Sometimes things are hard to trace, but I think one lasting effect is that a majority of people in the country now believe, one way or another, that our current state of affairs is untenable.
at this point with the strikes we are seeing, i think covid is what helped cause this feeling.
It’s more than Covid. It’s Covid plus the last BLM wave plus the shortage of job fillings that’s been building since 2019.
+the housing crisis (and really rental crisis too) +USED car prices up 40% in the last 5 years +climate change/climate crisis +all that, previously mentioned
seriously i dont see a way for this fucking country to recover (and this is a good thing, im just saying, because this means that a lot of people in the coming months and years are going to slowly realize what side theyre really on and what we need to do to solve, or mitigate the mentioned crises)
