Watch out you might get what you're after
Cool babies strange but not a stranger
I'm an ordinary guy
Burning down the house
Hold tight wait till the party's over
Hold tight We're in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house
- Burning Down The House by Talking Heads
Before I get to deep into this post, I should say that I started writing this on November 29th. They day got away from me as well as the week, so I never returned to finish it. My 'fire' for writing this up has diminished, so unless the act of writing itself fans those flames back to life, this will be a short post.
So I left off my last Ferguson post talking about the news getting out and the protests beginning. Lemme say that I'm a fan of protesting. I think there are two great types of protests. The first is the simple, raw, emotional "We've Had Enough And We Aren't Going To Be Quiet Any More!" This is the way that I saw the Ferguson protests as they began. They were spurred to protest from the news that A White Cop Killed An Unarmed Black Teenager. As 'news' continued to trickle out it just got the people more and more angry. Stuff like:
- He put his hands up and said "Don't Shoot"
- He was shot in the back
- He did nothing to spur on this killing
Of course this would make the people more angry, and the protests got more emotional.
The second type of protest is more thought out. It's a group of people getting together not only to protest an action or act, but having an agenda. Having a desired outcome. Maybe it's legislation, maybe it's an arrest, maybe it's just an acknowledgement from the powers that be. The main thing that separates these protests is their inception and their goals.
To compare and contrast, consider the protests in Wisconsin and Michigan over the state legislature's push for "Right To Work" (or as I like to call it, "Fuck The Unions"). Those people got together to block what the legislature's were attempting to do. They wanted to bring attention to a governing body moving outside the peoples will (or at the last, what they considered the peoples will). Once the actions were finished (both states ended up passing the bills), the protests stopped. They had no reason to continue.
How does an emotional protest stop? What action makes them go "Ok... we're done protesting and need to move on with our lives"? Sadly as I see it, most of the time these protests stop only when their emotional fortitude has either weakened, or gone over the top and ends up in a riot. That's what happened in Ferguson. Sure, the protest transformed into a riot once the grand jury didn't indite Officer Wilson, but it was headed there anyway.
Now to lay all the blame on the protesters is pure folly. The police had their ham hocked hand in it too. They could have let the protesters do their thing. They could have let them gather, chant, parade around with signs, and... well... protest. But the police acted like the thugs that many people believe they truly are. They tried to stop the protests... sometimes violently.
Come on... did they have no basic understanding of what these people were protesting? They were protesting police over reach, racism, and police violence. So to stop their protesting they over reached their authority, did so with some obvious racism (not all of it, but even a little is WAY to much in that scenario), and did so with violence.
Now with any argument or debate (and really, a protest is one side of an argument/debate), you have three audiences. You are preaching to the choir, you have those who are trying to make up their mind, and you have the opposing side. There are of course many shades of grey between these three audiences, but you get the idea. So long as a protest stays on message (very hard to do when it's an emotional reason to protest), doesn't get co opted, and doesn't devolve into a riot, they have a good chance of informing people trying to make up their mind and paint their opposition as 'the bad guy'. But that road stops iimmediatelywhen it comes down to a riot. At least for most people.
Ferguson protesters did all three of these protesting sins. Their message was murky at best. Were they against this one police officers actions? Were they against the Ferguson police department? Were they against police over reach and violence over all? Was this about racism? Police brutality? Racist police brutality? Every time they talked (and yes.. I know they weren't all one group, but that's the second point), they were changing their message and bringing in all new evidence to argue against.
They got co opted. National figures came in to talk about racism. National figures came in to talk about police brutality and the militarization of the police. People came in to protest things that had nothing to do with what spurred on the whole protest.
They rioted.
End of discussion. You can't effectively argue against brutality or racism or anything really once you turn to violence.
The only people that I understand in a riot are those that come to specifically cause mayhem and to steal. I don't mean that I understand their motivations, but I at least understand what they are doing there. The rest of the people.... what the fuck? They are tearing down their own community and burning it down. How exactly does this help your cause? I guess they could say that they are bringing more attention to their cause, but it's not as though Ferguson wasn't ruling the airwaves. And the attention the riots bring are exactly what they don't want.
Sadly, this dovetailed into the protests in New York. In case you missed it, a police officer was not indited by another grand jury for using an illegal choke hold on a black man that ended up killing him. Unlike Ferguson there was a video of this happening. Everyone got to see the police officer put the man into a choke hold (remember... it's illegal for the police officer to do that!), got to hear the man crying out "I can't breathe", and if they were so inclined got to watch the man die.
To me, that was a cut and dry matter. The police officer attacked an unarmed man who was acting non violently (although he was WAS defying the police) using an illegal move and killed him. There wasn't conflicting witness reports. There wasn't anything really in the way of a grand jury to stop them from inditing the officer. Remember, the grand jury isn't finding guilt or innocence. They are simply stating that there is enough to send a person on to trail. That grand jury looked at what I can only call 'damning evidence' and said "Nah... there's no doubt that anything illegal happened here and there is no way possible for this officer to be found guilty".
Yeah.. I would have protested that too. And people in New York DID protest. But they did so non violently. With the Ferguson riots so close in time I could easily have seen this turning into riots too... but they didn't.
Bravo.
I wish I had some over arching message to preach, but really all I have is "I hate and do not understand riots".
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