Here I sit, hoping the student’s march tomorrow is the start of that momentum.
Or, the continuation of momentum started by the women’s marches.
/sorry, no witty hash tags. I’m not cool enough to grok that
//oops, slashies are for Fark
//but there’s gotta be 3…
FYI Organizers are saying that there will not be a physical march due to extremely high numbers expected. It’s going to be one giant protest!
Heading down there first thing in the AM myself.
3-5 days of a real national general strike would probably be sufficient to hurt them. Probably more than two weeks to actually change their behavior. The last time we actually got anything close to that scale was maybe '34. You had the Minneapolis, West Coast ports and Toledo Autolite strikes all in one summer.
The non-fascist majority of America is a nice thing to have. Maybe they’ll actually stop fascism from happening in America.
The good news is, Trump might dream of being a fascist dictator, but he’s still the elected president of at least a semi-functioning plutocracy. Optimists even use words like “democracy” or “republic”. The Economist calls it a “flawed democracy”.
America is still miles away of being a fascist nation.
The bad news is, you don’t need to be a true fascist in order to start a war for no reason and kill a few million people. You just need enough people ready to believe that there really an enemy that needs defeating by military means right now. And I have no reason to believe that there is a non-militarist majority in America.
The only type of protest that I know really works is a third type. It’s the kind where people arrange to gather not to change hearts and minds, and not to cause inconvenience, but just to show those in power that they disagree. This is how the Berlin Wall fell, this is how most of Eastern Europe transitioned to democracy. Unfortunately, it needs a rather large majority to work.
Good Luck - to the whole planet, but especially to Iran.
And I have a bottle of Lagavulin…
Cheers!
(But remember: Alcohol is no solution. It’s just a solvent.)
It’s almost as if someone asked themselves “which name would cause the biggest distraction outcry if we announce who is going to replace McMaster?”
Bolton playing the same old song:
I understand that there is no simple, easy solution to this. I appreciate that the challenge is daunting.
But if your objection to radical action is because it is dangerous, because people might get hurt…you need to understand that people are already being hurt. In massive and rapidly escalating numbers.
All of those lives need to be included in the calculation, not just the American ones.
If Trump was threatening to kill millions of Americans, what would you do?
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
BTW, obligatory historical nitpick:
Modern India is approximately the same geographic size as the USA, massively more populous and spectacularly diverse. When Gandhi was doing his Ahimsa stuff before partition, it was even larger and more diverse.
From 2005:
Unfortunately 1972 was a lot more rational time in American history; there were plenty of Republicans ready to impeach Nixon for Watergate, but today’s GOP and Trump. . . ?
I’m not really sure what kind of effect huge massive protests or strikes will really have, assuming we could even pull it of (and more than a third of the country never votes at all.)
Trump isn’t going to resign, Fox News will invent all kinds of bullshit excuses and paranoia, and the GOP will double down on it. The most believable outcome is massive protests invigorate the predicted “blue wave”, so it’s still a long game we’re talking about. Protests are not a magic bullet.
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