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| Protest of George Floyd's murder, near Seattle's City Hall, after George Floyd's murder (Photo: SounderBruce) |
Protests are so unseemly ...
… Unprofessional. Useless. So say people who don’t know any better.
But when
every day in the U.S. seems like a Twilight Zone episode whose plot was
inspired by A Tale of Two Cities … when we continue to accommodate the ever-metastasizing
dystopia created by our government …
… then
the usual resistance – voting out the bad guys, petitions, emails to Congress,
posting a call for McConnell’s/Pelosi’s resignation on Facebook – is not
enough.
It’s
time for an intervention. Consider:
Tents, battered cars,
pick-up trucks line the road. Next to a battered truck, a bucket filled with
water and a sponge... a muddy doll… what
remains of a camp fire. A scene from The Grapes of Wrath or 2020-style affordable housing? Yes.
A thought leader
proposes that some people die for the good of the nation’s economic order.
Fiction or reality? Yes. Jonathan
Swift suggests that poor parents sell their babies to rich people to eat (“A
Modest Proposal," 1729). Texas Lieutenant
Governor Dan Patrick suggests that getting people back to work and “restoring”
the economy is too important to let the potential spread of COVID to seniors -
whom it might kill - get in the way. Unlike Swift, he meant what he’d said.
In the U.S. (as of today, July 23, 2020), there are
four million known cases of Covid and nearly 143,000 related deaths, 30 million
about to lose the $600 they receive in lieu of pre-pandemic paychecks, and 28
million people on the brink of homelessness.
So what’s Congress doing? Not much. But to be fair, these are huge problems,
and there isn’t much time for our leaders to work on them, what with their
two-week July vacation and their month off in August.
What about the president? The presidential candidate challenging him? They have been busy - hawking beans and hiding out. And the public? They are stunned! By Kanye’s presidential
bid, not by the contempt, cruelty, and callousness permeating D.C. in the middle of both a public health and an economic crisis, each of historic proportions.
When the public puts
up with a pandemic that the president appears to treat first as a profiteering
opportunity, then as a campaign annoyance … when Mitch McConnell laughs at the
prospect of extending the aforementioned $600 lifeline before it expires … it’s
time for protest. Time to follow the lead of Black Lives Matter and other activists – e.g., Seattle’s Fight for 15 folks and Tax Amazon
activists – whose work often has meant the difference between real progress and
unity commissions, pragmatic incrementalism, bipartisan “compromise,” and the
like. Protest breaks the silence, validate outrage, galvanize activists and allies,
and redefine what is possible.
Yes,
protests are unseemly. They have to be. Owen Keehnen, an LGBTQ historian and ACT-UPorganizer, talked about the group’s in-your-face approach to AIDS activism: “There were people [allies] who feared we’d lose
everything we’d gained if we weren’t cooperative and nice.” ACT UP’s response
was, according to Keenhen, “…
cooperative and nice is killing us.”
