You’re inconvenienced? So was Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, etc.
Some of this protest has been in the form of marches, and some of it has been in the form of organized nonviolent action.
On Nov. 28, about 100 people formed a human chain at the West Oakland BART station and prevented the trains from running to and from San Francisco for more than two hours.
Everyone seems to support the cause — almost no one in the Bay Area wants to say that they’re OK with letting law enforcement kill unarmed people on the thinnest of pretexts — but so many people are far more concerned with the dreadful “inconvenience” of these traffic disturbances.
Having to ride AC Transit across the bay instead of taking BART, or having to wait on Market Street for the Muni train to move, is somehow more upsetting and stressful than the reason why people are out in the streets.
[...] they’ve been doing it for as long as this country has been around.
In the Declaration of Independence, the list of our Founding Fathers’ grievances against the sovereign includes: “For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: for protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders.”
The list of people who are killed by law enforcement in egregious ways keeps growing, and most days it feels as if nothing will change.
[...] a few people decide that they’re not going to make peace with it.
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963 letter that he wrote from a jail in Birmingham, Ala.
King’s fellow clergymen wanted him to avoid doing anything that would make the people of Birmingham feel uncomfortable.
When I mentioned that on Twitter this week, people responded to me, in all seriousness, that the marches and sit-ins of the civil rights movement weren’t disruptive.
Go ahead and tell me that the protesters should be ashamed of themselves because you worked a long day or you had an appointment to pick up your kid.