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Last Night In Boston
Coming home from work last night, I ran into the Boston protest over the decision not to indite any of the officers involved in Eric Garner’s arrest and death.
Stipulating that I’m as bad as anyone in estimating the size of crowds, there were certainly hundreds of people there (The Globe reports “thousands” at an earlier event, of which this one spun-out from). It was pretty chilly too: right around freezing. So far as I could see, the crowd was overwhelmingly college-aged, and disproportionally — though not majority — black.
The protestors had taken over the streets surrounding South Station, one of Boston’s main commuter rail and metro stations, and the site of Occupy Boston a few years back. Even by Boston standards, the area’s a mess to drive through under any condition, and the despair in the faces of some of the drivers who were stuck in the traffic was something to behold. BPD were on scene monitoring and also guarding the on-ramps to prevent anyone from going down onto I-93.
Almost all of the content of the protest was was explicitly race-based and attempted to connect Garner’s death with Michael Brown’s: “Black Lives Matter!” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” were popular — indeed, dominant — slogans for signs and chants. If you removed just a few of the signs that directly reference Garner, the protest could easily have taken place before the grand jury in New York made their decision.
At one point a chant of “Shut it down!” started. I had no idea what this was referring to at the time, but it may well have referred to efforts to shutdown the interstates and metro (each briefly successful).
Published in General
A French book called “The Coming Insurrection” gives
a prescription for revolutionary struggle based on the formation of communes, or affinity group-style units, in an underground network that will build its forces outside of mainstream politics, and attack in moments of crisis – political, social, environmental – to push towards anti-capitalist revolution. The insurrection envisioned by the Invisible Committee will revolve around “the local appropriation of power by the people, of the physical blocking of the economy and of the annihilation of police forces”
I didn’t read it, but I remember Glenn Beck talking about it around the market crash in 2008. He said, “It’s coming here,’ and I think he’s right.
Shut down Boston to retaliate against a judicial decision made by a grand jury in a completely different state.
Sounds legit.
It reminds me of a time when I went to a wedding in Northampton MA, and had to navigate through a crowd of people protesting the Arizona law that allowed police to check immigration status on routine stops. My thought at the time was that it seemed totally lost on these people that they were protesting issues that they couldn’t possibly experience (but for the illegal immigrants coming from Canada).
Two thoughts on this:
1) I can almost guarantee you that virtually every protestor in Boston (and likely in NY and Ferguson) cast a vote for Barack Obama, twice. I am not saying this is Obama’s fault, obviously, but I can’t help but think about the difference between tea parties (yes, people gathered), where political advocacy and voting was the primary focus, vs. these protests where grievances are simply vocalized (or acted upon through rioting).
2) Again with Obama, and here I understand that I’m making something of a far-fetched connection, but I wonder… All of these people voted for Obama as their savior and the magical cure-all for whatever it was they were upset about. He promised big and delivered nothing. He has never once changed his rhetoric, only pointed to the bogeyman of republican obstructionists and “other” (impliedly, racism or hate from conservatives). He is a complete failure as a president and owns none of it. I wonder about how it must feel to have put all of that “hope” in this administration, in the first black president, etc… only to find out either a) that your “best” isn’t good enough; the person you always dreamed of is a lie, a fraud, or a failure, or b) that you are so oppressed by people so powerful that even your savior cannot do anything. So all of this talk about “systemic” oppression by unseen, uncoordinated, and unorganized groups – for most people, it is obvious enough as complete nonsense, but if you believe it, it must be pretty scary. The cynic in me wonders if Obama/Sharpton/Jackson, et. al. know this full well and take advantage of it because this is exactly what they want.
These people want to live in a particular alternate reality of their own creation, and have brainwashed themselves into an inability to see the reality they actually live in. There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that either of these events had anything to do with race, but they feel that if they yell loud enough, they can make it true that these events were about race. That’s the leftist disease.
Back in 1971 or so, the students at the University of Pennsylvania started a big anti-war demonstration at 4pm on a beautiful Friday afternoon in spring. The demonstration soon moved to Walnut Street, a major artery for traffic leaving the city, and blocked it for more than an hour during the beginning of the evening rush. The traffic was blocked all the way back into the center of the city, where gridlock seemed to have taken hold.
I had a conversation with a vocal protester. I asked him what he thought about the possibility that an ambulance might get stuck in traffic leading to the death of an innocent person. His reply, “There are people dying in Vietnam.”
I wondered at his callous disregard of the deaths he might be causing, and his (phony?) concern for people far away.
I recommend shooting protesters who block traffic with rubber bullets until they disperse, and arresting as many as can be rounded up.
The untold tragedy here, when you read signs like “Black Lives Matter” is that the law and its enforcement are meant to protect everyone. Black lives are put at risk — more at risk — when cities are abandoned by the police force to the criminal element, when law abiding citizens are not permitted to own hand guns, etc.. These are uncomfortable facts. The protesters unwittingly agitate for more black lives to be lost in the pursuit of this agenda to right supposed injustices of the present with a mindset that is focused on the distant past. I suspect a lot of light could be shed if all of the parties supporting these movements could be identified.