Originally published at: Father fights back against protesters blocking traffic in NYC - Boing Boing
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Surely the headline should be “Gentleman (in the Boing Boing sense of the word) assaults peaceful protestors”.
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This isn’t “fighting back”; the guy instigated the physical violence. Have we really reached the point where assault and battery is seen as an acceptable response to people protesting and blocking traffic?
What comes next? Do we go back and pardon the guy who ran over the woman who was counter-protesting at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally?
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“I have a daughter in Brooklyn” Not an viable excuse for taking out one’s frustration on protestors.
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I don’t approve of these protestors blocking traffic (which has nothing to do with how I feel about their cause), and I also don’t think this form of protest is effective as it has no chance of forcing the hand of anyone in a position to have an impact on their cause and is more likely to turn people against the cause than to win them over.
Still, this guy’s reaction was not appropriate. It’s never okay to use violence against peaceful protesters, regardless of how inconvenient their protest may be to you personally.
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These types of protest rely more on the short term gains of “any publicity is good publicity”, which i understand but find shortsighted. The people you really want to win over is not the media but the regular joe, and if you head out there and disrupt traffic so bad that it screws up half the city’s day they are not going to be receptive to anything you have to say.
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I wonder how this might have gone if he went the route of “can you please let me through so I can visit my daughter?” instead of “get the fuck out of my way so I can visit my daughter, SHOVE SHOVE”. Maybe the protestors would have been the jerks in that case and refused, but it couldn’t have hurt to TRY being nice.
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I think the “my daughter is dying and I have to bring her medication” might have been his best chance, although I don’t think even that would’ve worked.
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A lot of people had daughters in Gaza too
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Blocking ordinary people gets you nothing but aggro, if you want to protest,l do it in a way that gets in the way of law makers not ordinary people.
If you think that man, or any one else who had their day disrupted has suddenly become your ally because you made them sit in traffic for 4 hours, your mistaken.
Its like just stop oil in the uk, sitting on top of trains and blocking the motorway, where they did stop people getting cancer treatment , meant the uk ended up with harsher laws against protest.
And lads made their mates wear, just stop oil t t shirts on a stagg night, knowing the police would stop them, until they where forced to remove them, one guy was even forced to change his tshirt on a flight as they would not even let him fly with a just stop oil t shirt on…
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One thing to keep in mind is that protest is not meant to be raising awareness. It’s a power move, a threat to the government that a cause can mobilise people and disrupt the normal flow of life. And if they can do it on this day, how many more days can they do it on? And if they can mobilise this many people to get out and do something, how many more people are sympathetic enough to vote along their lines? If you ignore the protestors at this stage, what percentage of them will be radicalised further?
It’s worth noting that the media almost always downplays the radical nature of protest when it’s discussed in a positive manner. This is in part to be able to point to the protestors they deem to be bad and ask why can’t they be like the protestors they deem to be good - while ignoring that a lot of the latter category were considered to be in the former one at the time they protested.
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These high and mighty protestors who assume the right to disrupt ordinary people’s lives could learn a thing or two from MLK, whose civil rights movement was nothing if not civil, and did not block roads or sidewalks to make their point.
Protest the law makes not the people.
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That is a highly white washed narrative.
The civil rights movement regularly disrupted daily life in the south. The point of protests IS to disrupt normal events, in order to raise awareness and make change. While non-violent, they most certainly regularly disrupted plenty of things. You think that you can have thousands of people march down a road in Alabama and NOT disrupt daily life?
Read a book. The king led movement portion of civil rights was not as unobtrusive as you’re saying. At all.
More “non-disruptive” protests from the classical civil rights movement…
But sure… they never blocked a road… /s
Give me a fucking break… I mean… DOES THAT LOOK LIKE NOT BLOCKING A ROAD…
FFS…
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I cannot possibly improve on @anon61221983’s history lesson above, so I will just support the idea that learning about history before lecturing on history is a very good way to avoid looking stupid. It’s just a thought.
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It really is difficult for some to understand just how much King was hated in his time, and just how much disruption the civil rights movement actually created in the 50s and early 60s. The whole era has been heavily whitewashed in the public imagination and people mistake “non-violent” for “polite and unobtrusive”. But some people push that narrative in order to defang that movement of its radical side and to discredit modern movements using the exact same tactics as the classical civil rights movement. One hopes that what is at play here is just ignorance and not malice.
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Wow. This must be really embarrassing for you.
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There are many reasons and tactics for protests. Some are indeed meant to raise awareness. Particularly intra-community protests. Like when trans people and their allies protested Human Rights Campaign Dinners.
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This is a weird thing that happened while I grew up in the South. As a small child and young person I vividly recall the narrative of the dangerous King the disruptor being the dominant one. Kind of like “and that is what their degenerate culture values, unrest and noise, unruly and demanding, it’s the drugs that made them like this… etc.” People who marched for rights were definitely not lauded or considered peaceful and compliant at any level. At some point a lot of the same culture of people and frankly in many cases the literal same people began shifting to another narrative in which King is more palatable but there were no inconveniences caused by him and people were just like “oh yes, here are your rights why didn’t you ever ask before silly dears?”
But both narratives are unreliable.
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Perhaps it’s a measure of how low my standards have dropped that I also assumed his being in America also meant that he shot them.
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