It means we should not give up hope or stop fighting when we feel demoralized.
And where exactly do you see yourself in that metaphor?
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DJT makes a big show of standing for the ‘Rule of Law’ and ‘Law and Order’ - clearly, his idea of Law is different than most people’s.
Law of the Jungle, in fact.
I know I’m being ranty here, but I mean the question seriously. Don’t “stop fighting”? Fighting how? I haven’t seen any fighting. I’ve seen a lot of talking. I’ve seen a lot of pearl clutching and finger wagging. People coming into the streets for BLM was great, but what has been gained? Did those protests move the needle in any appreciable way? And if so, do we think he won’t make moving it back job 1 of term 2? IDK. Did the Democrats embrace a more progressive vision and rise to the challenge, or did they just keep patting backs and taking checks? I’ve marched and I’ve written to senators and congresspeople but I don’t see any of it working. All I see is the toothlessness of the legislative branch as a “check and balance” on a tyrannical executive. I feel like we’re trying to stop a Panzer tank with a leafleting campaign.
As for myself, I’m on the tracks too. And I despair when I hear people further up the line saying things like “He’d never drive the train this far” or “Our railroad is too safe for us to get hurt”.
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“Law and order” politicians have never respected the rule of law.
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Yes, you are ranting.
I hope the venting helps, though it sounds like you’re already resigned yourself to being ‘down on the tracks,’ like you’ve already accepted defeat.
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I would dearly, dearly love to be convinced otherwise. If I stop ranting, will you tell me what you mean by “fighting”? And if it’s more of what the left has always done - marching, protests, articles in The Atlantic - why you still think it will work when for the last four years it’s proven to be so ineffective?
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If you think “widespread public protests against injustice” are an ineffective tool for change then you should see where “passive acceptance of injustice” gets you.
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I didn’t tell you to stop ranting;
I merely agreed with you that’s what you were doing. Though I must say, if it isn’t actually making you feel any better, then it’s a rather useless endeavor.
As for the rest of your comment;
Dude, I am a middle-aged working-poor Black woman - I can’t tell you how you “should be” fighting, or that relying on the complicit Democratic party to lead the charge for real reform is ever wise… it’s not.
Giving into hopeless despair isn’t the answer either, though.
Personally, I have more at stake than many people gnashing their teeth and wailing how we’re all doomed no matter what. Yet I still refuse to just lay down and die.
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If Trump is admitting that he ordered a murder - that’s not a federal crime - it’s a state crime.
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Personally I draw the line at “when I’m so deep in despair that I start to negatively impact people I care about and demoralize others” and defend accordingly. A lot will be out of my control. That’s a given.
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Ah, yeah, you’re right. Still, it seems like something local police would handle, arrest, and then have some one transport him back to where he was being charged.
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You really can’t have any sort of proper authoritarian regime if you don’t execute some dissidents. Even better, this one might actually have been guilty of something! Maybe.
Please report for Patriotic Re-Education by noon tomorrow.
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The abandonment of due process is the last stop on the fast track to total, unfettered fascism.
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Of all the horrible places I thought Trump might go, dog-whistle encouragement of “militias” and white supremacists, fraud, money laundering, violating various governmental ethical rules and laws, voter suppression, etc, I did not actually think Trump would actually feel empowered to actually send out murder squads. Well, here we are.
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This is too much. You guys need to vote him out and you need to make him leave in January.
And I’m really sorry that those are two separate things now.
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It can be two things! It’s against federal law for officials to deprive people of their civil rights, which was the legal basis for the feds prosecuting Rodney King’s assailants after they were acquitted of state charges.
Not that I expect Trump to ever be held to account for any of this shit he does while in office. Best case scenario is probably that he gets convicted of the State tax fraud he committed in NY prior to getting elected.
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I would agree that widespread public protests CAN BE effective. But they can only ever be one piece of the puzzle. The best they can do is create a political moment of opportunity. But it’s an opportunity for sympathetic political forces to swing into action and press the agenda. We’ll never know what would have happened if the Democratic leadership had remained utterly complacent in the face of the civil rights movement of the 60s. You NEED people with political capital - wealth, power, connections - to support the movement at the top while the people are stirring up things lower down the ladder. And it’s better if you can catch an opponent unawares, so that they don’t already have a strategy in place to counter your agenda. I daresay the older men, WW2 vets many of them, who planned and prosecuted the Vietnam war had no idea what kind of popular resistance they would meet from the youth and the anti-war movement. Their surprise was a crucial part of what followed.
Occasionally widespread protests will change a mind or two at the top. But can we agree that this guy isn’t going to change his mind?
BUT - this all hinges on “widespread”. Hong Kong was widespread. Compare the numbers of protestors involved in that one action against the number of BLM protesters in the US. The system shrugs off small numbers of protestors and loosely-coordinated street actions, since they are more or less constant and have been since the 60s. If you could get 1% of the population in the street, it would be 3.25 million people. I don’t see anywhere near those kinds of numbers coming out for social justice causes. And 1% might not even be enough, though it would surely be closer to enough.
It’s not clear to me whether the Hong Kong protests were successful either, because they didn’t have enough political power closer to the top of the hierarchy to carry their agenda forward. The regime waited out the protests, then went ahead and kept pushing the same agenda, because anyone who disagrees with the agenda doesn’t get to have power there. Sound familiar?
I don’t like “passive acceptance of injustice” any more than you do. But what now constitutes “active resistance to injustice”? The same-old, same-old? I’ve been in leftist politics long enough to know that everyone loves to pile on the guy who says “maybe it’s not working.” But is it working?
He’s lost a lot of the independents and moderate Republicans, which was a big part of his slim victory in 2016.
Why play even more to his base?
Everything he’s doing is about encouraging more violence.
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So again… you sound like you’ve already given up all hope.
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No one has been saying “we had a protest, now everyone can go home and forget about it.”
The people who get involved with protests are MORE likely to be involved with the political movements you describe; more likely to vote, more likely to attend city council meetings and town halls, more likely to lobby legislators for specific policy changes, more likely to demand accountability for those who abuse authority, more likely to be engaged in the mechanisms of society in general.
So yeah, I’m much more supportive of the BLM protesters than I am of the people who sit behind keyboards moaning about how ineffective the BLM protesters have been.
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