A Thousand Mixed Emotions

[jducoeur]

(None of this is thoughtful introspection. It's time to just say a bit of what I feel.)

It's very strange, sitting in my comfortable (if isolated) environment, and seeing capital-H History happening all over the country.

We were in Waltham this afternoon (just to get a bit of ice cream and go for a walk in a slightly less crowded environment), and drove past a single protester, standing silent vigil in the square beside Moody Street, holding a sign. I can't help but think that it was so correct: anger, solemnitude, and protest against the monstrous time we are in.

I have a lot of co-workers in Minneapolis, which is one of my company's main centers -- I won't deny that I'm worried for them.

But my heart is very much with the protesters: the justification here is so real and so deep, and this is bringing to a head so many years of horror, that I don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who says they should just sit back, shut up, and continue to take it.

And yes, I'm a little horrified by the violence -- but very conscious that a fair chunk of that (quite likely most of it) is almost certainly coming from a combination of poseurs and provocateurs (all too many of them white) who are intentionally egging it on. A few are trying to discredit the protests; I'm sure that all too many are simply trolls who are taking advantage of the opportunity to get their rocks off and do some damage. None of it reduces the reality that enough is fucking enough.

And of course, you have Trump and his master crony Barr (who I halfway feel is an even worse criminal and traitor than Trump, because he bloody well ought to know better than The Great Orange Infant), pouring oil on the flames in order to score political points. A race war would suit Trump just fine at the moment. When even Mitch McConnell sounds downright measured and reasonable compared to Trump (and appears to be trying to distance himself), things are way off the rails and careening into Crazytown.

And there is this uncontrollable sense that 2020 is one of those years that a thousand history books will be written about: when all the insanity and poison and incompetence leading up to this moment came to a head. There have been many such years in history. Most of them aren't happy stories.

And like so many, I'm carried along with events, a frustrated passive observer of moments that matter so much. I don't have anything useful to say, and not much useful to do. But we can't pretend that this is okay, and we can't pretend that this is simply a causeless eruption.

I don't know what is to come, and I don't know what the best possible outcome is. But the current situation is intolerable, on so many levels. These protests are right, and just, and necessary, and I hope that folks manage to come out of them safe and intact...

Comments

[alexxkay]

I used to oppose revolution, on the grounds that they inevitably come with mountains of skulls. In 2020, the "status quo" is already building such mountains...

[elusiveat]

There are revolutions and revolutions. In most cases, I think that violent overthrow of the state is a bad strategy not only because of the pile of skulls, which is plenty bad enough, but also because it almost inevitably creates power vacuums combined with social environments that are ideal for takeover by authoritarian strongmen.

On the other hand, the Minneapolis riots are a long way from that kind of revolution. There is a huge difference between property destruction and violence against human beings. And there is also a huge difference between localized chaos, even with a modest body-count, and a coup d'etat.

What the riots do is to scream out: things are still not okay. What we do about that is a different question.

[jducoeur]

I still generally oppose violent revolution, because it is almost always counter-productive. There have been instances where it has led to good things, but they've been few and far between. Most of the time, the people fomenting it turn out to be even worse monsters than the ones that came before, regardless of the political viewpoint that they are theoretically espousing. Good systems generally come from unsexy, slow, slogs of sausage-making -- this stuff is hard.

But there's a clear and crying need for *change* right now. That shouldn't be in the form of random violence, but I'd like to hope that the sporadic riots are acting as a 2x4 to the head of the body politic, getting its attention. The depth of systemic racism in the US today is horrifying, and folks need to wake up to it.

There's a clear and simple message that needs to be driven home: This Isn't Okay. Casually accepting (or worse, fostering) an order in which a large fraction of the population are routinely oppressed, sometimes violently but even more often more subtly, damages everyone. It needs to stop, and the "all opinions are equal" pseudo-relativism that has been supporting it recently needs to be called out for the nonsense that it is...

[cellio]

It's appalling -- the systematic failures that lead to abusive confrontations in the first place, the repeated downplaying of minorities' concerns for safety, the political manipulation, the trolls who want to stir things up even more and don't mind posing as "the other side" to do so (trolls trashed my city last night), the knowledge that this will happen again and again and there seems little we can do about it... I haven't formed coherent thoughts yet either, but I am at least heartened to see that in *some* places uniformed police are standing with the protesters and some mayors and governors can see through the trolling, but boy do we have a long way to go. :-(