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Discipline of Riots
I went to the drug store on an errand and saw her: A very obvious member of a riot cadre. Well-polished Doc Martens, all black clothes, a red rat tattoo on her arm, and she told the store clerk the rat tattoo signified that life is a rat race. When she left, the store clerk and manager both gasped and told me that she scared them. She was alone and not really big enough to personally scare me, but there’s no doubt in my mind what she is.
I remember back in 1999 or so, a lady moved into the apartment below mine. She was a transplant from California’s Bay Area. She introduced me to her daughter, who over the course of several months bragged how she was in a movement. She emphasized their discipline. She lamented that the new ones didn’t understand the discipline of shining their boots and wearing their clothes properly. She bragged how they had burned an animal testing lab in California and other acts I can’t recall today. She gave enough detail to convince me her tales were true. She was a naive fool, clinging to belong to something.
The young lady I saw today wasn’t as brainless as my neighbor’s daughter, she was pretty intense. She had all the “discipline” that I had been told about.
Anyone not seeing that these riots have nothing to do with race is being willfully blind, or a useful tool.
I just wish I had the presence of mind to take a photo of her.
Published in Policing
If she was pale, then she was probably Goth.
Is that still a thing? I was hoping I’d outlived it.
There is a similarity of color of dress, but Goth is more desperate, progressive terrorist is more utilitarian. She was not Goth. She was young, healthy, intense, very commanding presence. She had an air of someone used to telling people what to do.
Sir Terry Pratchett wrote about this.
Who is that? Is there a link?
You’ll remember for next time and now I will too. Thanks for the description.
https://www.amazon.com/Night-Watch-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett-ebook/dp/B000W912Q0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1591135369&sr=1-1
famous fantasy/humor author. He explores who the real dangerous people are fairly well in this one and its surprisingly relevant.
Thanks, I’ll read it.
Maybe strictly in her own mind. Ignore it – and she’ll regret the ugly tattoo when she is on in years…………
Tattoos always look to me like they are used to cover skin disease.
You’re in for quite a world if you read this.
Totally agreed about the relevance of this entry. One of the best in the series. Pratchett deftly handles the humor and message here when it comes to revolution.
You have your progressive protestors who are down with the cause … but not to the point of being willing to risk it all for that. They may remain progressives all their life, but they don’t go to the final “By any means necessary” level. That’s the Kathy Boudin level, where bombings or armored car robbery/murders are OK because change must come, and if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
That may or may not be where this woman ends up — right now, there’s still a certain fear of talking that final step into actual domestic terrorism with long-range advance planning, because 9/11 made it really tough to defend bombings and murders, based on root causes (The New York Times got their fawning Bill Ayers story in just under the wire in their 9/11/01 edition, which hit the streets about 10 hours before the first jet hit the Twin Towers).
Whether or not some offshoot of Antifa is willing to go full Weather Underground, we’ll see, and then we’ll see if the media of today mirrors the media of half a century ago, which tepidly condemned their bombings, while noting their ideological hearts were in the right place (and I suppose 45 years from now, we’ll see if the girl at the store has become a college professor).
Did you tell her that you, too, were part of a movement where everyone understood the importance of shining shoes and wearing clothes properly?
Never ignore someone so utterly convinced and focused – the True Believer. These people are very very dangerous. Maybe in future years, if this is suppressed, she’ll fizzle out, but maybe not. Such people often go on to be Che Guevara types.
This is a now very dated film in many respects, but take a look at Patriot Games, and the characters played by Sean Bean and Polly Walker – they are the True Believers in that film, the ones most dedicated to the cause. Those types are very real, and they are ruthless.
Funny, I just reread this one a few weeks ago. Pratchett could never go fully tragic – the book works out to have a satisfying ending where the revolutionaries are consumed by their own passions and the previously riled up crowds go back, cow-like, to their former lives in peace when the madness passes. Sadly, real life doesn’t work this way. In Pratchett, the villains always are stopped.
Well it’s still Discworld at the end of the day. Essentially, humor in a bad situation.