• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Sadly, being humans, violence inevitably is proposed at some point.

    Cornered rat engages in uncivil conduct, news at eleven.

    I don’t condone violence, but Martin Luther King Jr. made a salient point, “A riot is the voice of the unheard.”

    There’s a real argument that MLK’s movement was a failure thanks to its refusal to engage in civil defense. Getting chewed on by an attack dog on the Montgomery Bridge wins you some sympathy points on the national stage. But, in the end, the Walter Gadsdens of the 1960s were replaced by the Sandra Blands of the 2010s. Police moved the violence from the streets to the prison cells and the liberal voter base lost sight of the problem.

    What can men do against such reckless hate?

    The grand experiment that was America is crumbling before our eyes

    The illusion that we fashioned in the 70s and 80s is, perhaps, fading. The story we were all told in grade school about America being this beacon of liberty, this shining city on a hill, is wearing thin. But the America we’re left with isn’t that different from the America we started with when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s kicked into high gear.

    The Reagan-Era papered it over so long as a big portion of the whiter population could live fat, happy lives in the suburbs. Now the suburbs are failing and white professionals are no longer this privileged segregated class. We’re being forced to live in the same shit as everyone else, while some asshole bureaucrats in DC and on Wall Street hold up a big Line Goes Up graph and demand that we clap.

    I am unsure if we as Americans can make things better without it getting worse first

    I think, one way or another, the brutal authoritarian state we’ve constructed to oppress dissent is going to have to break. Maybe it’ll break from too many white nationalists tearing it apart from the inside. Maybe it’ll break when too many angry proletarian Millennials and Zoomers tear it apart from the outside. Maybe it’ll hold and things will continue to get worse.

    But somethings got to give if you want change.