"Protests"--violent or not--won't change anything; only an atmospheric shift away from Trump and his party will

It appears that I am going to have to spend the rest of week camped out in this office building after work until 5AM because of truncated bus service due to the continuing curfew. The increasingly questionable motivations of these otherwise generally narcissistic people here in 90 percent white and Asian Seattle seems only explainable by their desire to show the world they don’t really “approve” of what police are doing in other cities, so please don’t blame us and  hurt us here, whoever “they” are. Sure there are some bad apple cops in Seattle, but there are other places in this state, like Kent, Kirkland and Yakima, where police are more apt per capita to take shooting practice on civilians, and nobody seems to care about that. There comes a point where these protests in cities where businesses are being looted and torched, start to lose that “point”—and even more so in cities that don’t necessarily have a “police problem.”  

Yes, we can see that people are angry, and something should be done about cops who step over the line; but needless carnage doesn’t address a central question of what we expect from police in regard to confrontation with those  who commit crimes—especially those who don’t think they have to pay for what they did. No one should be surprised that the lawyer for the police officer charged with murder in the George Floyd case produces that mysterious “missing” video (if it in fact exists) which likely shows what led the officer have the 6-6 Floyd pinned on the ground; it shouldn’t exonerate the officer who probably didn’t intend on ending Floyd’s life, but it may put in the minds of jurors that element of “reasonable doubt,” which is a scary prospect considering the rampaging that is going on now. As I mentioned yesterday, if that missing video ever does appear and it does not follow the current narrative, the media will be at fault for having a hand in the carnage that is happening now. 

Anyways, what is happening now in places that have not had in recent times those kinds of racially polarizing events, such as Seattle—which has rather seen the kind of “gentrification” in which formerly black and Hispanic neighborhoods are being driven out by newly arrived white and Asian/Indian transplants—it is mostly white people who are driving the protests, mostly for the reason stated at the top.  In the past there were some examples of young radical white people whose anger about society was genuine, and they had a genuine desire to change things; yet they were doing so in a society that largely was for their own benefit, and those who were oppressed merely saw them as opportunistic troublemakers who could just as quickly turn around and go home to their comfortable lives, and nothing would ever really change. 

Take for example the so-called Days of Rage event recounted in the 2002 documentary on the radical student group The Weather Underground, which occurred in October of 1969 in Chicago. Former Weatherman Bill Ayers participated in this event, which was supposed to attract tens of thousands of radical youth angry at the war and society in general. Ayers recounted how small the turnout actually was (only around 300 who were actually ready for “action”) and how badly outnumbered these “kids” were by the police, and how he remembered wishing that someone would “save” them from what they were about to do—which was to go rampaging down the streets, engaging in mindless wreckage, before they were dispersed by police after only a half-hour. News coverage of the event was mostly one of befuddlement; no one could quite figure out what the point of it all was. Even the head of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton (later drugged by a police plant and murdered in his bed during a police raid), expressed disgust at the pointless gesture, acknowledging that their hearts might be in the right place, but accusing their actions as being “Custer-ized” and “muddle-headed.” 

There is a stark difference between what we are seeing in cities that have contentious relations between police and the minority community, and places like Seattle, where police are mostly a benign presence because, well, not a whole lot is going on, with most of the trouble to do with the odd drug dealer with a score to settle with a competitor, some useless thug looking to settle a score with real or (mostly) imagined enemies, "innocent kids" who think it is a "right of passage" to steal or vandalize, the large homeless population that is camped out in various areas in and around downtown, and hotels where people with mental health and drug problems are housed and occasionally escape from. Frankly, I don’t know what is worse: people burning down their own communities, or making pointless self-serving gestures; at the end of the day, what has changed? Children are still being detained in cages within Trump's concentration camps on the border despite the COVID-19; I suppose the "protestors" just ran out of gas, or lost interest.

Let’s face it: Most of these "protests" just provide cover for a few people to act out on their asocial aggression, and for most others to just go out and mingle because they don't know what the hell, or at least not that they know what it is like to walk in the shoes of the "others." You can't change human nature, you have to "force" people to "adjust" their behavior if not their attitudes, and the only way to “change” the current foul atmosphere is by the ballot box, and that will require an across the board landslide vote against anyone named Donald Trump and those associated with his party who help him load the courts with reactionary judges, and keeping people like William Barr and Stephen Miller from being the ideological “center” of social and domestic policy. To quote George Will's op-ed in the Washington Post:

In life's unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation's domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration (a reference to Vichy France's collaboration with the Nazis), leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for ... what?