The strike was nonsense anyway. Why were drivers striking -- punishing the innocent residents and visitors (and protestors/allies!) of New York (a sanctuary city!), in an attempt to punish Donald Trump?
Sure, one thing you can do is disrupt the specific people doing something bad. But that's pretty rare. As MLK explains, the point is to create a more general disruption so that everyone has to take notice of an issue they might otherwise ignore:
"Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."
The whole thing is worth reading. In particular, this bit always wakes me up: "I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a'"more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."
The injustice is the negative peace we have been living in. At some point the Executive sins of the Bush/DNC dynasties has to be rolled back. I mean, it's not like he invaded a country and got people killed. It's fantastic that Trump's small steps have lit a fire, albeit misdirected. Maybe it's just a side effect of the massive unemployment married with the social phenomena.
But racial injustice isn't just a side effect. It is quite often the point. If you read Loewen's Sundown Towns, you can see that quite often white people just don't like to see black people doing well, especially doing better than themselves. You can see the same thing echoed in Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Lands", although people have mainly learned not to say it out loud.
You're playing with words to fit a narrative, which doesn't match reality. At the same time, the Trump tropes are not about invasion of another country, so now you're being disingenuous just to argue. Good luck with that.
I'll continue to assert most of the outrage is misdirected.
> As MLK explains, the point is to create a more general disruption so that everyone has to take notice of an issue they might otherwise ignore
The problem with this approach is that unless you do it in a way that's relevant to the original issue, you're just dragging innocent people into your fight and victimizing them. Depending on how much of an asshat you are to them (like, say, stranding them for several hours at an airport when they've just got off a flight), there's a good chance you'll push them to be less sympathetic to your cause.
To the extent that that's true, I'm not sure what the standard for "relevant to the original issue" should be. Taxi drivers are disproportionally Muslim and Sikh and disproportionally immigrants. (noted here: http://democracynow.org/stories/17050 ) Does that count as relevant enough? If not, what would? If so, what else would?
I think that protestors should be careful about their tactics, but I don't think they should have to invent ways to tie a protest's theme to its objective. We protest when our moral values are offended, and that's enough of a reason.
I felt the London Tube strikes went this way. The arguments put forward for each strike never seemed convincing enough to be causing everyone so much inconvenience.
The media coverage plays a good part in this. At least here in Brazil it's very common for them to evade the motivation of the protesters 'bigly' and put a big focus on how it's disturbing others and etc... The result is predicable.
Innocent people are already being harmed. Here, refugees and Muslims. The protest is to call attention to that harm.
But let's run with your notion. Suppose there is somebody who says: "I guess I didn't know about the civil rights violations and the deaths that this policy will result in. And I guess it's terrible that these refugees have been waiting years in limbo trying to rebuild their lives. But what's really important is that I expected to be home on time for dinner, so now I won't help them."
I don't think a person like that was every going to be sympathetic to the cause. They weren't going to do anything. They were going to ignore it.
And that's exactly the point of MLK's style of protest. It is to make a problem for some into a problem for all. It is to make it impossible for comfortable people to keep ignoring the problem.
So the solution is to harm more? That's not a peaceful protest, that's terrorism.
Raise awareness. Be loud. Be visible. But if you base your protest around screwing up someone else's day the response you get will more likely be "hey maybe you deserved it" than "wow we should help these people."
Ok. If you really can't tell the difference between "hour late for dinner" and terrorism, then either you're trolling or you're beyond hope.
If you think you know a better way to lead protests, by all means show us how. But I have no time for armchair experts whose only contribution is "u r doin it rong bcuz I dont lik it".
The people who would say, "maybe those refugees deserved it" because something was mildly inconvenient for them were never, ever going to stir themselves to do the compassionate thing. Ditto the people who value a sliver of comfort over helping legal residents arbitrarily ejected from their homes.
Your claims here are those of the white moderates that MLK called the greatest stumbling block to black freedom. Apparently you haven't yet bothered to read his "Letter From A Birmingham Jail". But I'm done trying to spoon-feed it to you, so if you'd like to pursue this further, take it up with him.
You sir have a lot of patience. I read the "arguments" as "the children don't want to be bothered". That thing about order x justice sums it up. They don't give a shit.
Thanks. I have some compassion, because none of us really wants to be bothered. I too would like to stay in my comfortable bubble. But sometimes people wake up.
It was only 1 hour.
Doesn't anyone ever protest in America? It feels like this concept is so new to you.
Yes - some people might be less sympathetic, those are not the people the protest set out to influence. It's the people who haven't made up their minds yet, the people who think that "This will all blow over soon" and want to get on with their lives in their bubble. They NEED to be inconvenienced to react, to make up their mind that this is something they can't ignore. Only then when you engage the apathetic can the protest grow, and protests must grow otherwise most of them fizzle.
It seems it's pure misdirection at this point. I also notice that people sort of become "trained"(unconsciously) to be incredibly sensible to anything that may deligitimize any sort of critical action or against the status-quo in general but then using a whole different weight for other stuff(maybe because they're "normal"). Results seems to be: demobilization, immobilization.
It's not only to influence the people directly affected, it's also to generate news coverage which will get the greater population talking about the cause of the protest. Which is what is currently happening obviously.
Stop distracting. Blacks don't kill other blacks for being black -- but KKK did and hate groups do. MLK's quote about protest was relevant not for race reasons, but to illustrate that the insistence of order and the vehement resentment of unrest is not a passive stance, but a conscious ideological, statist one.
NYC residents being hazily "on their side" in a broad political struggle is distinct from actively doing something to oppose the EO. Again, read the Letter.
And no, it wouldn't. Although that is something that he did quite a bit of, given that he got his start as a Baptist preacher, so I'm not sure your analogy works.
He didn't intentionally disrupt people already supporting him. As in, he didn't block a group of people trying to get to a church that was about to preach about black rights.
He disagrees with the white moderate proclaiming "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action." You are committing that error.
No I am not. I am fine with disruptive protests, but they should be disrupting the people who need their minds changed. What is so difficult to understand about the fact that we are talking about protesting in the wrong place entirely?
The analogy is MLK protesting in an all-black church to prevent the constituents from hearing a sermon from a civil rights activist.
This has nothing to do with "inconvenient" protests so much as idiotic protests disrupting the very choir to which they are preaching.
> they should be disrupting the people who need their minds changed
No. You continue to fail to understand MLK's theory of protest. If you have read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, you give no sign of it.
If the people being disrupted are already active in a movement to change things, they will not mind the protest. But if they are merely people who say "I agree with you in the goal you seek" without active support, then they are the very moderates that MLK was addressing here: "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate [...]".
All of the people involved in the protests from top to bottom are just virtue signaling. The CIA went into Syria in 2006 and started funding and training opposition forces leading to the current civil war. The Obama administration is responsible for a quarter million deaths in Syria alone. And that doesn't include the use of cluster bombs, an act considered a war crime in most of the civilized world, on several of the countries listed in this "ban." And yet now that a relative hand full of people can't travel here... that's the real monstrous act. Don't get me wrong, I think the "ban" is pants on head stupid, but the people protesting don't give two shits about Syrians or the citizens of any of the other 6 countries we're bombing.
Many of those protesting are objecting to green card holders being blocked entry into the country they are permanent residents of.
People will always protest against things that are more immediately visible to them than things they read about in infrequent news articles. That's just human nature.
No, people protest against things that the media manipulates them into protesting for. The inflammatory language has been scandalous at best. The media didn't encourage people to protest when Obama and Clinton proudly funded a wall between the US and Mexico in 2006. But now we've had "No Wall" protests in quite a few places and traditional leftists making right-wing supply side economics arguments against renegotiating NAFTA... yet another thing both Clinton and Obama campaigned for in 2008. Make no mistake, this is the butt-hurt media's doing.
I'm glad something is finally happening over there. After watching the second Iraq war happen with the media doing pretty much nothing, I can tell you that I could not agree more with what you said. But it will blow over and then it will be back to business as usual.
Me too. What's happened over the last year (more really, starting with the RP revolution) should be viewed as evidence that it's really not business as usual.
Some of them, sure. Maybe even most, though I don't think so; all of the people I know who are involved in this stuff are very well aware of Obama's militarism. But all of them? That's just lazy. And wrong.
You don't have to protest every cause to protest any cause. You can even protest things that, taken together, demonstrate you hold ideologically inconsistent views, if you want. That's on you.
>all of the people I know who are involved in this stuff are very well aware of Obama's militarism.
That doesn't help your argument. They were aware Obama killed a quarter of a million people and did nothing. Meanwhile Trump inconveniences some travelers and somehow he's the monster worth protesting. Get real.
>Don't get me wrong, I think the "ban" is pants on head stupid, but the people protesting don't give two shits about Syrians or the citizens of any of the other 6 countries we're bombing.
This in a nutshell is why things will get worse stateside. There will be those who write off the circumstances behind where we find ourselves today as human nature (an absolution of sorts, a moral line item to be paid when the circumstances are brought to their attention, not too dissimilar from the likes of HSBC et al when they pay penance in the form of monetary notes for aiding and abetting criminals as defined by a given state) and join the protest, and there will be those who apply the tools refined during war agaisnt their "own" at such protests.
Either way, only those who come out ahead outside of any virtue signaling will probably be the suppliers of such tools.
