House of Eratosthenes

Protesting does have a point to it. If I were to say “protesting is not free speech, stop protecting it, get rid of it” you would no doubt be inclined to say “You’re wrong, Freeberg!” And you’d be right; I’d be wrong. The function protesting provides our society is important, and irreplaceable. It protects us against the charismatic demagogue, as a bulwark against mob rule. It empowers us so we can’t be enslaved to the “Everyone who’s anyone agrees with me!” thing. Sometimes we need to see someone stand up and say “Not everyone. I don’t agree.”

In the last several decades, a trolley has come off the tracks because the protest, itself, has become the platform of “Everyone who’s anyone agrees with me.” Also, for the protest to fulfill the vital function discussed in the paragraph above, it has to be associated with a narrative that is provable, or at least one whose truth can be plausibly suggested and sustained — and is coherent.

The term “peaceful protest” is way overused lately. If you’re blocking me on my way to work or some other errand, your protest is not peaceful because you’re interfering in the activities of other people who have nothing to do with the subject of your protest, people who’ve done nothing to you. There is a myth floating around that this is a necessary ingredient, that the protester’s job is to see to it people are forced to pay attention, deprived of the option to ignore. That’s false. Force is force. Initiating force is not peaceful.

Football players “taking a knee” are not guilty of this. They are interfering with exactly nothing; but, they are taking advantage of a captive audience, spoiling what should be a fun time for people who are not involved in the subject of the protest one way or another. They have the right. And, others have the right not to like it. And to talk about how they don’t like it, effectively creating a protest-against-the-protest. Which seems, to me, more successful than the original knee-taking protest.

What the football players are really guilty of doing, though, is leaving out the coherent narrative. They want what? Do you know? Tell me, because I don’t know. But you can’t because you don’t know either. That’s because the protest has become a mere act, without a unifying message, apart from “look at me I’m part of the protest.”

Not saying it should be banned, but if it is, I’ll not be crying over it. For an infringement upon free speech to occur, there has to be some actual speech being infringed upon. There’s none here.

The coherent message has to be somewhat complete. When I was a young lad there were some local shops, some of which were franchises of large chains, placed on the receiving end of labor strikes because the latest union negotiations were thought, by some, to be unfair. So the “workers” demonstrated. Side note: They were under intense pressure to see to it everyone around them could get past them, and go where they were intending to go, free from any interference whatsoever. Even the “scabs” who were replacing them, and the customers crossing the line. That was a don’t-even-think-about-violating-it rule. And it got dicey, because people got close together.

We were all surrounded by the message that the protesters were in the right, though. The latest negotiations were unfair. But the details were nobody’s business. No one ever explained to me how I was morally obliged to conjure up some well-intentioned passion, and sympathize with these protesters for the unfair terms of work that were being imposed upon them, but at the same time it wasn’t any of my business to know how these terms were unfair.

It’s forty-some years later and I still haven’t been provided with a good answer to that question.

Yet another mental virus has escaped from the ivory tower. This is the NFL version of that old campus standby, “awareness raising.”

You’re not supposed to actually DO anything while “raising awareness,” mind you, because actually addressing a problem requires all kinds of boring stuff like work, in places where they won’t even let you take a selfie. And besides, a coherent program produces results — or not — that can be measured. This kind of thing can’t, by design. It’s all “paralyzed force, gesture without motion,” as some horrible patriarchal Dead White Male once said. Just as one Berkeley police officer does more to stop rape on campus every day than all the “awareness raising” stunts worldwide will ever do, so one public defender does more every day to stop police brutality — or whatever it is we’re protesting, I don’t even know anymore — than all the kneeling millionaires will ever do until the NFL goes bankrupt.
- Severian | 09/27/2017 @ 07:15

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On ProtestingWednesday, September 27th, 2017

On Protesting
Wednesday, September 27th, 2017