Where are the arrests? Where are the police vans full of people trying to change the system? Where are the jails overflowing with people crammed into miserable conditions as they put an ever-increasing strain on the resources of their jailers?
The point of non-violent protest isn’t to make those in power feel comfortable. It isn’t to ask politely for rights everyone else had handed to them 240 years ago. It’s to provoke a confrontation, to stretch those in power to the point where they lash out, demonstrating the rot that lies beneath the platitudes about bootstraps and property rights. It’s to show, in the words of Monty Python, the violence inherent in the system.
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
What we’re seeing now doesn’t resemble the marches in Birmingham and Selma or the Freedom Riders or the sit-ins. What we’re seeing now is a bunch of dilettantes. They aren’t serious about changing things. They just want to get on TV and virtue signal. They are angry because they think the right is distorting the “I Have and Dream” speech when what they should be waiving is “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King didn’t say ask nicely and take care that you don’t mess up the grass. He said demand, get in their face, shout, be loud, be angry, just don’t be violent. Because violence doesn’t get you what you deserve.
King’s goal was to create tension and push it to the boiling point. “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” he writes. It took months to create that tension in Birmingham. And it took sending children out to be arrested on Easter Sunday to create it.
There was violence in those marches too. There were people using that violence to smear the whole movement, not because they abhorred violence or loved property, but because they hated the people marching and hated what they were marching for. The right is holding up its end. It’s using a match struck to light a cigarette to justify murder with police complicity. It’s raised a million dollars for the shooter and raised it in the name of Jesus.
Are the marchers on the left up to their role? Are they ready to confront and to provoke more Kyle Rittenhouses? Are they ready to absorb the blows and the bullets from the Proud Boys, the Boogaloos, the militias, the police and the Department of Homeland Security? That’s what it will take. When you protest non-violently, when you follow the teachings of King and of Gandhi and — yes — of Jesus his ownself, people support your cause. The polls show it. Is the left ready to make the sacrifice? Is the left ready to demonstrate Christian values against the Christianists and the performative patriots?
If you are, then the Republic might yet, at this late date, be saved. If you’re not, if you strike back, if you burn, if you allow the MAGAts to lie about your stance and your actions, there is no hope. The American experiment will end Nov. 3 and we will not see it arise again in my lifetime.
Oran Today 