Nope. I lacked sufficient interest to read the original article; I was just commenting on the “emergency vehicle” meme that surfaces after seemingly every protest. As to this specific protest, the chain can be unlinked and vehicles moved in the event of a kaiju attacking or similar emergency that requires emergency vehicles to cross the bridge. And, as was pointed out, there isn’t much likelihood of an emergency that requires vehicles to cross the bridge; if there was, everyone on the bridge would probably have more important things to do than protest or protest at the protest.
Funny because exactly this scenario played out on Reddit, too.
Simpler explanation: people actually adapt well to larger (even systemic) traumas. For example, losing an arm sounds catastrophic, something that would ruin you, yet the long term measured effect of limb loss on people’s happiness is surprisingly minimal. Compare with the squeaky, broken screen door you never have time to fix, yet nags you every single time you walk in the house. Or a shitty one hour each way commute every day. Happiness, daily ongoing happiness, affected in a vastly disproportionate way.
In other words, it is better for people’s wellbeing to focus on small injustices they can directly change or affect, rather than fixating completely on large, systemic injustices that are unlikely to change in their lifetimes.
You can work on both, of course, but people who think only of the big picture may go a little bit crazy. And going crazy is not conducive to, well, anything.
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One of the users on /r/subredditdrama shared that story.
Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting you here but you seem to be saying that massive trauma is actually not that bad compared to minor annoyances. Well, racism had a profound effect on African American mental health. By extension, every other minority in America suffers this to some degree.
Are you saying you’d rather trade places?
Uh, yeah. Working on both would indeed be preferable. I’d like for less people in this country to treat me like a perpetual foreigner and less black people to be murdered indiscriminately by police.
Besides which, the book you linked isn’t about ethical concerns. It’s about personal obstacles like being blind vs. dealing with blind people. That’s completely separate from things like racism, sexism, poverty, and bigotry.
The fact that the average American is more upset about their football team getting knocked out in the playoffs than their fellow citizens being killed by cops, just because they’re a different skin color, is definitely a sign of selfishness. If you’re insinuating that this is somehow a healthy way to live, then… Well, don’t really know what to say.
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I’m just saying that’s the reality. I prefer to work within the confines of the reality, as I find it to be more effective.
I mean, can we really expect average people to walk around day to day being paralyzed by …
What makes me angry? Why is it that I get outraged by things that inconvenience me, but I don’t have any anger to spare for the young boys in Afghanistan who are kept as sex slaves by warlords, raped daily and screaming out into night with no one to hear them nor help them? Why is it that I’m not outraged over the thousands of Christians and Sunni Muslims being slaughtered by ISIS? 663 million people in the world don’t have access to clean water, and diseases from dirty water kill more people every year than all forms of violence including war. 43% of those deaths are children under the age of 5.
… everything that’s going wrong right now all over the world, plus the endless repetitive history of man’s brutality to man in the last thousand years, of nature’s brutality to everything? It is too much of a burden to bear, unless you are Ghandi, or MLK. Hell even then.
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I don’t understand the point of this statement. Sorry, this statement just sounds like rationalization for upholding harmful institutions because, hey, that’s reality. Nevermind that "reality’ has consistently been changed for the better through people who saw injustice and refused to accept it.
No. That’s the point. That’s why examining biases and being cognizant of your own privilege is so important. That’s why being informed about horrible things is important. It’s how women got the vote, slavery was abolished, and the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed.
Again, let me reiterate the question: Do you want to trade places?
The inability to see other suffering people as something worthwhile to become grieved about is what perpetuates that suffering. If you don’t care about it, you won’t do anything about it, and you tried to link a book that was talking about personal struggles to systematic ones. It’s not a 1:1 comparison. I’m sure if you told Dr. Gilbert that your takeaway from his book was that being a victim of systematic racism makes you mentally healthier than someone who has a noisy neighbor, he’d be at a loss for words.
What if you were part of Trey Crawford’s family? What if you had to watch video footage of your brother getting murdered by cops inside a Walmart for the crime of holding a toy gun, in an open carry state, without even being told by the police to drop his “weapon”? What if you had to watch the grand jury refuse to press any charges? What if those cops still kept their jobs and went back to their lives as normal as usual?
And most of the country doesn’t care because your brother was black and so are you. You wouldn’t call that selfish? You would try to apologize for their apathy by saying that this racism thing is just too big of a problem that can’t be solved, so the nation that twiddles its thumbs and allows this to happen would do better to complain about their parking tickets and grandma posting her annoying cat pictures on Facebook?
You gotta help me out here because I’m really not getting your logic.
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I am not really following. What are you asking people to do? Quit their jobs and devote their lives to… (x) cause? And how do we decide which cause is most important, again, of the thousands that matter? Maybe that is unrealistic, so how do we decide which 5 causes are most important? And to who? To us? To our family? To our community? To our country? To the world?
Should we donate regularly to (x) where (x) is the most important? If it is important enough, should we donate most of our money to (x) where (x) makes a huge difference? Change our Twitter or Facebook avatar to include an awareness ribbon? Post regularly on social media about (x) issue to raise awareness? Start a blog about (x) to study it further and raise awareness? When you are out and about in the real world, accost random people to educate them about (x)? Actively travel to places where (x) is a problem and work there in volunteer fashion to help mitigate (x)?
I agree there are lots of problems, and like many reasonable people I think racism is abhorrent bullshit. For example. I just don’t think me typing that into a textbox on a web page – or tweeting about it, or posting it on Facebook or whatever – is going to make any difference. That black guy who has to carry around his child’s birth certificate because racism, is not going to wake up tomorrow and find that everyone around him has become enlightened and 100% free of racism because I, Jeff Atwood, decried a tiny part of the bullshit racism he has to deal with on a daily basis here on BBS and on Twitter.
For the record I think the main addressable problem at the moment is the way judges and litigators and courts are far too closely aligned with the police, with giant conflicts of interest, and as a result actual prosecution of police for mistakes or intentional transgressions, even for super egregious stuff, just never happens. We need a hell of a lot more “separation of church and state” here. If you have some ideas on some way I can donate money or vote or otherwise help make that happen, I am all 
s.
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I’m neither a black person nor a driver, but this quote stood out: “The inconvenience you may have experienced today on the bridge – imagine what it’s like to have your life and your well-being continuously inconvenienced as a black person.” So sad that so many people’s natural reaction is to be mad at the protesters for causing a brief delay, and they’ll never even think of the why. Really people, you’re not that important. Time is not that important.
I applaud everything else that you said. Unfortunately, I have to disagree a bit with the last part. If emergency services can’t route around a block, then the city has much worse problems than any protest. What if there is no protest, just bad traffic or a wreck? What if a meteorite hits the road? What if Russians paradrop in Red Dawn style? Do all the emergency workers all just throw their hands in the air like they just don’t care and say “oh well, that one road is out, we may as well give up and go home for the day.”? No, they should have a plan and use it. If not, then any losses are due to their ineptness rather than the protest.
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The problem I have with this particular form of protest is that it doesn’t have any direct connection to the issue, and it’s not going to convince anyone of the importance of the issue.
When civil rights protesters in the 60’s disobeyed segregation laws by ordering food at a white lunch counters or riding on a bus they were sending a message: this law is wrong. Blocking traffic to draw attention to institutionalized racism is brave and has good intent, but commuters stuck in traffic, black or white, won’t necessarily see the connection, even if you explain later that it’s about waking people out of their complacency.
Then there’s the matter of convincing people that the issue is important. While blocking traffic is a strong statement, you can’t hold people hostage and twist their arms into agreeing with you, they have to want to agree with you. Causing a traffic jam is akin to browbeating someone into saying “fine, whatever, you’re right, now let me go” and then it’s back to the complacency of daily life. The civil rights movement of the 60’s didn’t really inconvenience anyone except those hardcore racists who didn’t want their status quo compromised; it addressed the issue head-on. Seeing Bull Connor using fire hoses and dogs on peaceful unarmed men, women, and children was a bigger wake up call to America than a traffic jam (which happens almost every day anyway.)
The ultimate aim should be getting laws changed, the same way the original civil rights movement helped get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. I think BLM can do that (arguably it’s already influenced the debate on officer-body-cameras, and stop-and-frisk laws), but rather than shouting “hey America, wake up” by blocking traffic, we should be crafting legislation and petitioning our representatives to pass it. Nobody wants to sit in a traffic jam wasting time and money and gas, but those of us who care will gladly wait in line at the voting booth.
I know I’m inviting accusations of “you’re liberal in name only” by not being 100% behind blocking traffic, all I can say is that’s a very Republican/conservative line of thought, a la “you’re either with us or you’re against us.” I will gladly admit I’m wrong if further protests yield clear victories, but I think we can do better than this.
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As @funruly noted
And after the nonbinding vote to keep the seal on Jan. 11 was reported, the negative reaction and mockery was fast and furious, including a widely shared segment on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.
However I think it is more realistic / accurate to call this social shaming. Social shaming definitely works. And people should be ashamed to be racists. Or to have that as their town logo.
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Literally anything. Protest. Current research suggests that even slacktivism works now.
People will go apeshit over women writing videogame stories but they can’t muster up that same outrage for innocent civilians getting killed by cops because they have the wrong skin color?
You keep framing this argument like I expect people to become Mother Teresa when my entire point is that it is healthy to be introspective, specifically what you get outraged.
Are you saying it’s a completely unreasonable request for people to think about dedicating their lives to causes bigger than themselves or their own self interests?
See the article about slacktivism.
So then the natural reaction should be demands that this should change and people should resign. That’s how anything changes. To just throw your hands up and go, “Oh well, this is bigger than me” simply perpetuates it.
This isn’t just a block, though. It’s a major bridge, and not only that, this was an unannounced protest. Given those factors, yes, I really do think there could have been real fatal consequences.
There’s no way to account for the scenarios you described. However, the BLM protesters could have absolutely chosen a different venue to protest or at least let people know before hand so ambulances would’ve known to avoid it.
Nah, I think lots of this will change, and has been changing. Just may not happen in our lifetimes. I think a not insignificant part of social activism is waiting for the old racists to die off.
Like, say, Scalia…
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Hey @metsuken I just wanted to mention… this is slacktivism I can get behind. 
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Only if you stuff a bunch of words in his mouth then extrapolate to logical absurdity.
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I am replying to his post that, because he is a white dude, he isn’t allowed to criticize. I disagree, no one should self-censor on the basis of their skin color. Everyone should be able to say what they want.
I don’t disagree in principle. But it is unwise to always say exactly what you want. To do so is indistinguishable from severe ADHD, which I know a thing or two about.
And anyway, freedom of speech is exactly that. You can say what you want, but the effects of what you say are on you for the most part, so it’s often better to actually think about what you have to say, whether you have anything of value to say, and whether your audience or forum is the right place to say it.
Here’s an example: I’m not an engineer, so I don’t really have anything of value to say to engineers about how they should be engineering.
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Okay, I can agree with you there. But, whatever your skin color, anyone should have their say on this, or any other, issue. It just seems to me that whites too often are self-censoring. And I don’t think anyone should do that.
How so? Whites have had near exclusive control of the microphone for most of western history. I don’t think it’s really a problem to offer up the mic and step back to listen for a while. It’s not like white people are a disadvantaged minority as a class.
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Wow these L’s are throwing me for a 
oop.
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HAL it is, then.
(I like Jupiter too much to not be HAL)
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The criminal justice system, and the prosecutor.
You can indict a ham sandwich. But the prosecutor couldn’t indict two murderers caught in the act, on camera.
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