They’re Better At Direct Action Than Us
The Capitol building being stormed is by far the biggest spectacle of direct action from the ground in my lifetime, and I think most of yours. From what I can tell, the building was breached through several unguarded and lightly guarded entrances and protestors essentially had their pick of the building almost immediately with no resistance. The capitol police, in what must be the biggest police failure of all time, let them in very easily and lost control of the building, and as of my writing this, have yet to regain it. You can talk about racism or a certain rightist favoritism, where leftist protestors certainly would have been shot, and that’s true. There has been one woman shot at the Capitol, possibly by police, best wishes to her. You might not agree at all with the voter fraud arguments that they’re putting forward, something I’ll write about later. You might think this is despicable or a threat to our democracy or everything else people on the news are saying, and you might be true. But if for a second, you could imagine this exact scenario for a different issue, say police brutality, or climate change, or war crimes or any other issue that are life and death for a lot of people, this should seem a lot more justified to you, and more importantly, there would be a lot more serious change on these issues. If you could imagine a black guy, grinning from ear to ear where Mike Pence is supposed to sit, a banner with a fist on it unfurled in a declaration of his human rights, many of the same liberals that want these protestors dead might be cheering them on. If you would describe yourself as affected in any way by the stonewall of inaction by the US government in general over time, and what Joe Biden has admitted will be continuing inaction from his government, it’s important for you not to shit on the method of protest with the message of protest, because if the left has any balls, there should be many more protests just like this against an incoming president who has said “Nothing will fundamentally change”. I guarantee you that if there ever should be a protest like this or even a quarter as intense from the left of Biden, he will take this incident as justification to use the same COINTELPRO tactics Trump used and more. Believe it or not, leftists, many of these protestors are realizing for the first time how unresponsive a capitalist government can be to its people, something we should know very well. While your initial reaction might be to snipe across at your easy target, maybe reach out and try to explain to them how police brutality is the first touchpoint of state violence, as they just learned. Explain how this continuous and unwarranted this state violence can be, and how much worse it has been for people that aren’t them. Explain how the system can be very violent to people without the boot of a cop, but instead with the threat of starvation and the mass denial of medical care for very preventable diseases. If you talk to them and listen to them, something everyone they see in the media seems totally loathe to do, you just might make a new leftist. While their cause may seem misguided and broken to you, their fervor, apparently on a short whim when they thought they saw their democracy taken, is undeniable, and the organized left, whatever we are at this point, has not ever come close to this in the United States. And a tip for any righties at a real protest, cover your fucking face and don’t take your phone.
