Originally published at: Protest blocks fwy (video)
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More of this, please. More of this. If we’re gonna get change in this stupid world, we all need to be out on the streets more often… myself included.
Shit is getting bad out there folks. The only way that will actually change is if we make it change. WE have that power, but only if we work together.
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Cost me about 45 minutes on my commute this morning. Fortunately, I have a job where that doesn’t matter one bit.
Probably not the case for all of those commuters, though. And they live in country where they can be fired without cause, where their access to health care is tied to their employment, and where there is an inadequate social safety net.
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True enough on that point… but I’ll point out that you don’t get change by making everyone comfortable. I do feel like things are reaching a crisis point (omnishambles?) for almost all aspects of life. And the people we keep electing (or enough of them anyhow) keep refusing to actually address all those things (including things like large scale transportation in urban areas, affordable housing, living wages, that directly impact the people you’re meaning, as well as endless wars and the crisis with our environment). I’m not sure how else we’re going to make things better if we don’t start really disrupting things in a non-violent way… The workers you mean are also voters (mostly) and can put pressure on their elected officials over stuff like this too, which is part of the point of disruptions…
And people forget that the civil rights movement often were disruptive to daily life and it was necessary for them to do such things to gain any ground.
So yeah, I feel for the people who got held up… but the reality is, doesn’t that happen on any other regular day on the highways almost any major city in America, and not for trying to make change happen? There isn’t a time when I go out on the perimeter of my city and I’m not sitting in traffic of some kind…
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Those news headlines… “Brawl breaks out” is a pretty weird way to describe motorists attacking protestors. But “both sides,” I guess.
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I don’t understand people who think actions like this endear people to their cause. Unless you’re protesting freeway sprawl or something, targeting drivers for some distantly unrelated issue on which they have no influence or impact seems likely to win you few converts, and in fact a lot of ire.
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I don’t think that’s their goal. I think their goal is to be disruptive. Whether that’s effective is debatable, but I don’t think they’re under any delusion that this will win people over.
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That’s an impressively succinct way of putting it. I agree that protests that make people uncomfortable or cause inconvenience are necessary for change. I do question how effective that can possibly be when applied to a war on the other side of the world, though. The commuters can’t vote to end the war, and the people they can vote to put in charge have only limited control over it as well. I can see a benefit to making people at least stop and think about the issue, but I can also see someone stuck in their car thinking “Jesus, I can’t get my own government to listen to me on even the most basic no-brainer issues like global warming or civil rights, and now these protesters want me to be personally responsible for other governments too?” Living in an omnishambles is fucking exhausting and it doesn’t take a big push to burn people out.
Maybe this protest is worth it, but it’s definitely not as clear-cut a benefit as the examples you listed, all of which have difficult but still tangible paths an individual living in LA could take to make a positive difference. I’m not sure the same can be said for the goals of this protest, unless perhaps it’s in fighting the spike in anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic prejudices the war has stirred up here in the USA.
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… organized disruption like this is meant to engage the “phases of grief” dynamic, where the protesters’ opponents first respond with denial and then with anger, but eventually with “bargaining,” when TPTB perceive policy changes as the easiest route to stopping the protests
OTOH the people getting angry about this may not actually be the decision-makers the protesters are trying to negotiate with
and even if they are, getting from anger to bargaining could take years 
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Do you think the civil rights movement “endeared” themselves to their white southern neighbors? Was there actions necessary to accomplish their goals, which was nothing short of ending violent racial apartheid in the south?
As @danimagoo noted, the point is to be disruptive to help get change.
Maybe, but it’s a war that we’re involved in, like it or not. We spend money to support one participant in this conflict, and we back them without reservation, even when they have refused to negotiate in good faith.
And what is the alternative to pushing for change? Yes, we’re exhausted, but do you really want to let these assholes who have a global death wish win? There is no real alternative to doing all we can to save ourselves and these chucklefucks who are driving us all into the acpocalypse…
Why not? Is it okay what is happening right now in this conflict and how we’re involved as a country?
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I dunno, I am going to have to disagree with blocking highway traffic. Every time a highway comes to a stop you risk accidents and deaths up the chain from people not expecting traffic to come to a stop. You got people gawking going the other direction causing accidents. This happens often enough already when there is a stalled car or accident that interrupts traffic. You are leaving yourself open to a lot of risk as a person on a highway as well, though I guess that is one’s own choice.
It can block emergency services, which isn’t good. And as someone else said, some asshole boss may not care what your excuse for being late is. 
You can have people feel boxed in with nowhere to go, which leads to people panicking or getting aggressive (fight or flight).
Yes it gets press and people take notice, but most people aren’t talking about the cause being protested, but the action itself. At a glance, one isn’t even sure what they are protesting for/against. The people actually in power aren’t the ones being directly targeted by the action either, there isn’t really any pressure on them.
I’d share if I had a solution, other than I think actions need to be more precisely targeted at the people in power. (ETA some text) I get the frustration where these sorts of protests come from, but I haven’t seen these actions really create any change either.
As a side note, I saw a pro-Palestine caravan of at least 75 cars on the highway ~2 weekends ago. They were in the slow lane and traveling at the speed limit. I don’t know what route they had planned, but I saw at least one news camera on a bridge filming them.
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For the sake of argument let’s say that emergency vehicles can get around the mess, and also forget about the people who just can’t get to work on time, and even forget about the poor souls who urgently need to use the toilet but are stuck in their cars. If you’re stranding thousands of people in their cars on a major freeway for hours then it’s a 100% certainty that somewhere in that misery are people missing important doctor’s appointments, possibly not getting to long-scheduled important medical procedures. And if there aren’t also some people who are actively in labor and/or missing the birth of a child that’s just through dumb luck.
There are many, many other options for nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience that can serve the role of “making people uncomfortable” without actually endangering anyone or holding thousands of random people hostage for hours. I just can’t see how shutting down a freeway is acceptable knowing the potential for harm to people. At a certain point can it even be considered “nonviolent” if you know that the act can cause serious harm to people’s lives?
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Yes, let’s just quietly ask for change and I’m sure that will work… /s
Again, you need to read up on things like the civil rights movement that shows just how disruptive they actually were to daily life. Disruption does get shit done. It’s never just politely asking for change. That’s very much a whitewashed narrative meant to keep us all quiet and from pushing for a better society.
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I’m not saying one needs to be quiet, but have it better targeted. Shutting down the block around government buildings, for example. For things like climate change, disruption of the offices of oil companies where the executives work. Coordinated protests that take place over multiple locations nationwide. The institutions that actually have power, vs the random person on the highway, which IMO, is too broad.
I can agree that disruption is part of the forces of change, even up to and including riots. I even think violence can be a part of resistance and change. But I don’t think all of the cases are necessarily “good” because of the cons. If it does contribute to success I suppose the ends justifies the means, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t other ways reach those ends.
YMMV.
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In what way?
That doesn’t do the work of actual disruption. It’s out of sight and out of mind for most people, because most of us don’t have daily interactions with our government entities. This is why the civil rights movement didn’t just protest at state capitols, but they took it out into the street and into public life.
I’d argue that an ongoing ethnic cleasning being supported by our tax dollars should cause major disruptions. A more apt comparison might the anti-war protests, which also came out into the streets in this kind of way.
Again, our understanding of how these movements achieved success is very white washed… the CR movement are seen as nicely dressed people not making too many waves, when they were very disruptive to public live on a regular basis. Same with the anti-war movement - as we only remember events like the protest at the pentagon, rather than the more day to day protests that happened all over the country.
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