Breaking My Rule

I have been avoiding writing about politics and social issues directly. This is too important to ignore.

The Supreme Court just issued a new ruling related to protest.

Everyone who believes their right to avoid inconvenience, while at the same time arguing democracy is a messy, slow process, and peoole petitioning for the recognition of their rights just need to keep waiting and keep “working within the system,” non-violently, have zero understanding that protest is indeed part of the system. It’s the final option, the pressure safety valve. When there isn’t accumulated status or wealth to address grievances, there is space, time and mass.

Those are equally distributed, because physics are the rules of the universe, beyond what we invent to try to supercede them. Protest leverages that equality, and is therefore counter to all those other inventions. It is the best guarantee to grievance not turning violent, and this attitude of disinterest, engendered through social and economic realities we enforce as our “way of life,” have been enabling violent suppression of it. For a democracy to work, on a practical level, none of us has the luxury to be disinterested in the rights of the others who are part of it. Yet, that lack of interest was enshrined at the founding of the nation, and we have allowed the people priviled by that fact to prevent this most basic reform since.

Folk spent the last nine or ten years arguing about whether getting suspended for saying racial slurs on social media was a First Amendment issue. I’ve been saying the First Amendment issue we needed to address was protest, because on a practical level, we do not have that right. It’s completely theoretical, and the state faces no practical consequences for violating it. They can and do use police to crush dissent, arbitrarily. The same police departments can be found to have violated those rights, repeatedly, and there is no mechanism that creates the level of accountability or pressure that leads to change. Taxpayers are on the hook for a fine, years after the dissent has been crushed and no one evens notices the judgment against police conduct. Next time protest comes around, same thing happens. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. Now, the Supreme Court is directly going after it. This was the inevitable conclusion of ignoring the reality, in preference of arguing theory, because frankly, inexperience and ignorance just outnumber experience, knowledge and wisdom.

The Supreme Court effectively abolishes the right to mass protest in three US states (Vox)