I don’t know what the move is here, I honestly don’t.
This can’t really be the point where everything collapses. It’s too absurd. Too fast. There’s too much pushing all of us forward. The stock market is plowing ahead despite the chaos. Covid-19 panic seems to be dying down. Places are reopening and it’s going relatively well. Everything’s going to continue forward, the maniacs from both fringes are just stirring up some madness right now.
But that might be my own echo chamber reflecting back at me. Confirmation bias is real, and it’s easy to see exactly what you expect in a catastrophe if you spend all your time staring at the carnage, but never take the time to stop and think.
Rabble-rousers are causing problems, that much seems to be certain. There are voices out there claiming it’s the protesters right to assemble and that the police are the ones forcing conflict, which could be true.
But once they begin vandalizing property and disrupting life the protesters have, in part, forfeit their right to be seen as peaceful. At this point they’re damaging others lives, and you can’t simply let that go on and view it as the cost of doing business.
Spray-painting walls. Smashing windows. Blocking traffic. These things may cost money to the affected, can be emotionally traumatic, or even leave scars where they take place in ways that aren’t always obvious.
I feel for the protesters who truly care for the cause and have been vocally asking for non-violence. In Denver (where I aim to move), it seems the people organizing the protest have been very vocally asking people (specifically, the white people who attended) not to take violent action.
They’ve been actively trying to prevent people from vandalizing public property! In this video the organizer of the protest group tries to stop someone from spray-painting the concrete, yelling at him “that’s not what we wanted!”.
Despite the horrific crime that led to these protests in the first place, they want things to remain peaceful. They just want change and equality, yet it seems many people would rather use this as an excuse to embrace their inner anarchist and prevent any real dialogue from occurring.
Normally I write because it’s cathartic, and helps me to either sort out my feelings on a given subject, or at least come to terms with it and not let it bother me so much.
But in this case…I just feel sorry for everyone involved.
I feel sorry for the cops at the current riots. Most of them just want to keep people safe and be safe themselves, but it can’t be easy to keep your cool when people are throwing things, screaming obscenities, or engaging in other…unkind behavior, all directly targeted at you. Yes, there are some monsters in the police. No, it does not mean that all police are monsters.
I feel sorry for the honest protesters who just want equality and safety. Their intentions are good and they’ve done what they can to keep things calm, but others have seen fit to take that away from them.
I even feel sorry for the ones out there destroying things(just a tiny bit). Unless their goal is to cripple a social movement, destroy a neighborhood, or spread covid around to a whole bunch of other people, this way of doing things is absolutely counter-productive.
Yes yes, some men just want to watch the world burn. But I’d bet that a lot more men have simply slid down a nasty road pushed by social media echo chambers, clickbait nonsense, and sensationalist journalism.
Combine that with the emotional wreckage from two months of quarantine isolation, add a dash of fear for your livelihood with unemployment at all time highs, and a general distrust of the powers that be who offered up two lackluster presidential candidates, or how they botched this covid-19 situation in general…is anyone all that surprised that a large portion of people feel inclined toward violent protest right now?
It’s a shame really, since a conversation about race is sorely needed if you look at the statistics around police treatment based on race in the states. But agent provocateurs have run away with this thing already. The only way I see it being handled better in the future is with stronger self-policing among the groups that organize such events.
But that’s a topic for another day.
A day where (hopefully) things have calmed down just a bit.
A man can dream, can’t he?
Til next time,
-Brandon