This is getting us nowhere

Martin Luther King was, as we all know, the peace at all costs guy. [checks notes] sorry, no, nevermind, that’s what we call whitewashing. Martin Luther King (not so famously) said “We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts.”

Well, we’ve been peacefully protesting for decades. Our words are not working. Holding rainbows got us Donald Trump. Comics got us fox news. Tweets got us ben shabibo. Protests and posts are getting us nowhere!

Peaceful protest makes us easy to ignore. Holding signs just get people to look away. The government and society at large just go “Aww, look at them holding signs and rainbows, so cute!”

Peaceful protest makes us vulnerable. The civil rights protests were met with police violence. There are images of peaceful civil rights protesters being hosed with a fire hose. 

Peaceful protests are regularly met with state violence.

January 6th sent a message. “We can do what we want” the far right will be more powerful across the world than ever. The signs are not helping! 

If the republican party can start an insurrection, we can throw a few rocks. They threatened to kill their own elected officials. We can break windows. They smoked weed in the rotunda, we can hold bricks.

We have been stepped on since the 1920s. The left in this country is a dying species. 

Rights were not graciously handed over, but reluctantly. And atop the blood of protesters killed by police

We will get nowhere, so long as we keep holding signs.

The fight for rights on paper for black people continued well into the late 1900’s. The fight for rights in reality is still continuing today. Today, all 50 states have legal gay marriage, idaho is planning to illegalize it.

There’s a very whitewashed version of events. The simple narrative taught in history class essentially goes: they held signs, the government went “my b, we’ll stop killing you”. The rights were not handed graciously, but reluctantly. Not to people outside holding signs, but to tattered warriors, atop the blood of those same protestors.

America has been the least progressive of the developed nations for the last 50 ish years. 

The FBI sent MLK a letter telling him to kill himself. The black panthers were bombed repeatedly. Peace was never the answer. It is an end, the means to peace has never been people holding signs. 

The means to peace has never been hashtags, it has never been signs, it has never been the behaviors of white liberals today. Sure, the posts and signs help. But it’s time to take off the fucking gloves.