《 Riots lead to destruction, destruction leads yo implicit bias, implicit bias leads to prejudice, prejudice leads to more riots. They solve nothing, nor have they ever solved anything at any point in history... no wonder it’s doomed to constantly repeat itself
I don't fully agree with you but I don't fully disagree with you. I definitely agree that MLK Jr would look at today's society and be incredibly depressed that his life's work meant so little - but as I said before, he had already noticed that by the time he was killed. Peaceful stories at the national level are always peacefully ignored - remember the adages, "if it bleeds, it leads" and "no one reads page 3". How many people are on the internet right now, talking like I am, trying to convince people like you that there's even a problem? If MLK Jr.'s approach were that effective of a strategy, we would have had no need for violence - there would have been no desire for it. Relationships between social groups require different strategies for conflict resolution than do relationships that are direct and interpersonal.
History has shown that strikes and riots *have been* effective tools for dealing with individual corporations. It's no wonder that civil rights activists would try to use the same techniques for protesting human rights violations at a social or government level. And again, we do run into an issue of definitions - I've been to a peaceful protest, (been to several,) but one where the only "violence" was a little shoving on the side of the police trying to break through a "human chain", and one of the protestors fell down. This was later labeled a riot by the press. Whenever the police turn fire hoses on citizens, these have to be labeled riots or the media would have to point out that the police were "at fault", there's always some clever doublespeak in those articles to avoid such a thing. And recently, in my state there were 'riots' which were parades of protestors who were peaceful until an "off-duty" cop started breaking windows and eventually got caught and beat up for it. Well, I don't know if it was the same cop, iirc in the first incident the perp wasn't caught or recognized, but was wearing the "color of the day", and supposedly photos showed a strong resemblance to the cop they did subsequently catch, but I don't think I ever saw the photos and I'm faceblind anyway.
I certainly don't think mass property destruction is the most effective tool in every situation, nobody does, but I also don't think there's that much difference between the cost faced by a company from destroyed equipment and the cost faced by a company from an effective (ie, no one crosses the picket line) strike. Either way, work stops. The second method, striking, allows for a speedier resolution of issues, but if the corporation does not have a union contract or smuggles undocumented workers into the building, or uses other underhanded tactics like firing the strikers or blacklisting them, then the first method, which is always called rioting, may be the only way to send a message to the company that exploitation of workers is not allowed. In our country, destruction of corporate property (not private property) is how effective strikes usually end, by the way, because our unions are too weak and do not have the legal foothold, if they even have the desire, to negotiate for their workers. Consider Tyson, for instance, since it was upthread - the "polite" strike in 2004 Wisconsin that had all union workers in one city removed for a year completely failed because Tyson just "temporarily" replaced the workers, and those new workers, after a year, had the power to dissolve the union. And, in 2020 Tyson workers in Tennessee had increased rates of transmission of COVID-19 compared to other workplaces, indicating the 'take the fight into the plant' compensatory strategy that the Wisconsin union chose instead of dissolution was not exactly a company-wide success. Destruction of company property and therefore preventing replacement workers *may be the only way* to "hit them where it hurts" - their profits.
Destruction of property is *always* an escalation of previous efforts to express and repair low morale.
One notable exception to the recent failure of peaceful protesting was that recent strike by the teacher's unions in several places. They were able to involve many of the families in the community - and nationwide - to put significant pressure on their Boards of Education and get their wages increased. This was also notable in that it was afaik the first such largescale strike by teachers that we've seen. But, keep in mind that in as many locations that the strike was successful, other locations failed; without community and national support, the teachers had not enough power. It's also notable that people who have nothing to do with schools and education still dismiss those strikes with sneers, saying "how dare they take the children out of school like that" despite part of the strike being over how we need to increase the quality of the content we teach our students and stop burning them out with quantity.
So if you consider how there is there is no significant moral difference between strikes and destruction of corporate property (which is called rioting), please consider that it's simply the following step you take when a body of worker's needs are not met - and again, what is necessary for the aggregate is not appropriate for the individual. We cannot use the same logic and reasoning that we use with individual interpersonal relationships for the relationship between a population of workers and their corporation, for the same cause as why you cannot predict an individual's actions using mathematics but you can, with certainty, predict a mass of people's actions.
For instance, it is never "appropriate" for a parent to destroy a child's private property, because the parent has the responsibility of ensuring the child's needs are met and one of those needs is that the child's developing boundaries are respected and strengthened; and it is never "appropriate" for a cuckolded spouse to destroy private property after being "cheated on", because the person doing the "cheating" is not physically, mentally, emotionally, or sexually "property" of the spouse... But the behavior of destruction of any property is still a common tool for communicating that boundaries, or alleged boundaries, have been broken, usually in an irrevocable, unrepairable way - regardless of appropriateness or effectiveness.
Honestly, behaviors are simply communication, nothing else. And if they - the corporation, the society - didn't want the communication to get that painful, it would have been more effective for *the people in power* to respect the communication made when it was still "peaceful".
Too bad the people in power are so well-insulated from the rest of us that there is no amount of protest that could impact their lives. That's the real reason the communication gets so repetitive - if nothing changes, how many times can one person say the same thing before they give up on life itself?
This is where I agree with you... I don't truly believe that there is anything that is 'effective' at inspiring and defending civil, worker, and disability rights. This country exists on the exploitation of the lower classes, can be argued that it always has, and ending exploitative practices may well create a society that has never existed and cannot even be imagined by most.
There are tools, and they are ignored. How many people have spoken peacefully and been ignored peacefully to this point? That's not an effective tool. How many strikes and riots did our country go through to establish OSHA and Equal Opportunity laws until Union's teeth were pulled and now those laws are so flagrantly violated? What is an effective tool to solve poverty when neither peaceful begging for change or violent demands for fair wages actually work?
But how can we not fight for this, how can we call ourselves a country to be proud of when anyone goes hungry or has to live without electricity? And yet people call this country great, they can't even comprehend why the suffering of their own neighbors should affect them. We are no longer united... how can this country survive without that basic principle?
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