> Protests have never once seemed effective my entire life, honestly
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.
> Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
> Right. What I'm saying is that the protests I've seen haven't been useful. I think it's either time to escalate or stop.
Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
With that comes that protests can be successful, and the trick is to figure out why the protests you've gone to haven't been successful then, as they probably could have been, and then try to change it.
It's you, and many other people, but unless you all get together and do something, there will never be enough pressure for things to actually escalate. You cannot "stop then escalate", you put pressure until it escalates by itself. But the pressure thing is something that people need to actively participate in of course.
> Right, but just because the protests you've been to in your 40 years haven't worked in the way you wished, doesn't mean you think every single protest through all time also been unsuccessful in changing anything, right?
I don't really care about historical protests tbh, that's the past. They may have been effective at the time but that's a different context, with different values and virtues
We have to operate in today's environment which is one where protest is just viewed as a part of daily life, an annoyance to be tuned out, like walking past a homeless person on the sidewalk
You might want to cite something, rather than do this.
Everybody seems to pretend to be black Americans, whose freedoms weren't gained simply by protest, but by being beaten and having dogs sicced on them while protesting before cameras, and the shame that white people felt while watching that on television - and the pressure of "whataboutism" coming from the Russians that the USA was being judgemental about freedom while also being an apartheid state.
Other people have aped the black civil rights struggle (deemed the "civil rights" struggle), and it has amounted to middle class people walking in the streets, congratulating each other and socializing. I don't know of any accomplishments resulting from that.
Street protests were traditionally a show of force; an indication that an overwhelming number of people were on the edge of violence. They often ended in a lynching, or the burning down of a building. Black people did not have that option, so they just offered their bodies to television cameras - this was not traditional, this was new. The only model they had before that was Gandhi, and that was not a traditional Indian thing as many think, but an idea he took from Tolstoy.
Time to crack open a history book and find out why Baltimore was called Mobtown.
Then time to crack open those dusty history books and start reading mate :) Most of the civil rights we have in modern life comes from either protests or protests evolving into riots or protests evolving into riots evolving into civil wars, one way or another. But it always starts with protests.
You might still be young and haven't yet experienced it, but you're bound to at one point or another, even if you yourself might not be out on the streets protesting and agreeing with the movement(s) when that happen.