Hitting close to home.

[bladespark]

It's a surreal feeling. Fire and broken windows and spray-painted slogans, not against some generic urban backdrop, but against a background of places I know, buildings I've been in, businesses I frequent. It hits very close to home.

There's a Trevor Noah video I watched that talks about the rioting. He turns off the jokes sometimes and just talks about things, and I think he said it a lot better than I could, when it comes to discussing why this happened.

You should probably just watch it, (sorry if the embedding is broken, the link itself is correct, though) but he talks about the social contract. The social contract is the unspoken agreement that human beings have about behaving like a society and not like selfish individuals. The social contract is what tells us to respect other people, their property, their lives, their suffering, and not just ignore all that so you can benefit.

The marginalized are usually pretty good at abiding by it. To the point that people will let themselves become homeless, let themselves starve, let themselves suffer in all kinds of ways, rather than go "fuck it" and loot and murder and whatever else. People in power, though, break the social contract all the time. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. It goes far beyond cop killings, though that's part of it. The people in power have broken the social contract in a thousand ways, large and small...and that means it no longer holds. So of course there's going to be rioting and looting and violence. Why shouldn't there be? If you're a marginalized group in America, there's literally no reasons other than selfish ones to hold to a broken promise right now.

So my sympathy lies entirely with the rioters.

I also have sympathy, of course, for people just caught up in this. Small business owners with shops in areas where there's riots. People who need to go out on dangerous streets. Those people.

But...

Well, the only reason I need to have sympathy for those folks is because riots inevitably attract hangers-on who just want to break things. Folks who literally just want to see the world burn.

Here in Eugene, I know the area where the riots happened well. There's a small, local business right there, at the heart of it, that I visit a lot. Growler Guys. I have an empty growler of theirs sitting not six feet from me right this instant. (Man, surreal!) But guess whose windows are still intact this morning? Theirs, and every other locally owned business on that street. Meanwhile the Starbucks and all the other national chains were completely ransacked.

The folks rioting know who broke the contract, and it's not their neighbors with storefronts there. The hangers-on may burn and loot anything and everything, but the people who started this and the people who are facing down cops and tear gas and imprisonment to keep it going know who the enemy is.

In fact I'd been cheering them on, except the cynical side of me is pretty sure this is all going to come to nothing.

I mean sure, on the one hand, riots have changed things. The civil rights movement in the 60s wouldn't have gotten anywhere without riots. (And if you think Martin Luther King Jr. was against riots, think again. Read his own words about it. He knew and understood the place rioting had in his own movement.) Hell, the Stonewall riots kicked off the gay rights movement that's more or less the entire reason I'm free to choose my own path as a trans person. I owe a lot to queer trans people of color who decided that violence was their only option in the face of oppression.

That hits close to home too, you know?

On the other hand, though, do you know how many race riots I've lived through? Wikipedia lists 23. You know how much the treatment of black people has changed across that period? (From 1978 to 2020.) Not very much at all. Add in the Occupy movement and all the other protests, violent and not, that I've seen accomplish nearly nothing, and I feel a deep, cynical sense of futility about how much the world will ever change. So what is there to cheer? People in power behaved like barbarians. Marginalized people finally got fed up with it. The cops came out and tear gassed everybody. Insurance will pay the megacorps for their broken windows, while fighting tooth and nail to not give a cent to small businesses, and life will go on unchanged.

The threat of violence and the words of strong, peaceful campaigners for change can combine to make those in power cave in and say on paper that marginalized people are real human beings and need to be treated as such. No amount of violence and no amount of legal process, though, can force people in power to believe it.

Comments

[tielan]

Can I share this to my DW feed?

[bladespark]

Feel free.

[tielan]

Do you mind if I link to you? I don't imagine there'll be much traffic from my DW/LJ.

I was thinking about asking if I could copy/paste on FB, but I might leave that for a bit.

[bladespark]

Yeah, that's fine. (A DW or LJ link is, that is. FB I don't really use, so I suppose that doesn't matter either way, really.)

[storme]

What I'm seeing reported (even by MN's governor) is that the bulk of the *violent* protests are far-right white nationalists being bussed in, across america, and deliberately targeting predominantly non-white neighbourhoods and non-white businesses.

[thewayne]

With Rights come Responsibilities. People have forgotten this, and that's one of the many things that has broken this country. It's a classic example of the "Open up the country now!" and "A mask violates my rights!" A mask is uncomfortable, but your responsibilities include my rights, and vice-versa.

Back to the case of the riots. I worked for a police department for nine years back in the '90s, I was a civilian doing IT. VERY different world back then! Then, the best day for a cop was when when not only does the officer come home alive, which is their right, but no one he encounters dies or is injured. That is their responsibility.

That has gone out the window. Now it seems to be their right to inflict maximum carnage and violence without ever being held responsible.

[silveradept]

It is absolutely one of those things where nothing will change while the structures are in place, and then, (hopefully) at some point, the structures fall away and things finally get better. So much effort will be expended for no apparent progress, until it suddenly all comes tumbling down.

We're in the moment where minds could be changed, and I think that Trevor Noah's bit is important to that - since everybody knows (and has had multiple repeated confirmations at this point) of who broke the social contract, and how widespread that break is, there's the possibility, however small, that we might manage to move the needle on this one, simple because there's no space where someone can say "that issue doesn't affect me" any more.

(And those agitators that just want to smash things make no sense to me, unless what they really want to do is cause more pain to the groups protesting.)