Protesting is cool and good

This is like, the third time I think that I am writing a post about protest, I can't believe it, I can't believe a lot of things lately, my life is a nightmare from which there is no awakening. But that is beside the point at the moment... let's go back to talking about protests.

There is a type of "liberal" that is somewhat less helpful than we might like, this type is usually white, well off, and a member of either the media or the Democratic party, it's these folks we find on TV and social media condemning violence and disruption and attempting to appeal to your better nature. They say that now is the time for understanding, that you can make your voices heard in some other way, that we need to reach across the aisle and convince the other side we can work with them.

They could not be more wrong. They advocate a strategy of appeasement that has never worked for long, and always backfires on the appeasers, they are part of the problem just as much as right wing media figures who incite racist violence are. It isn't out of hostility, they come from a position of privilege and are unlikely to personally be hurt if/when the policies explicitly advocated by the ruling party are passed, they, and their friends and family, will be safe right up until the goldshirts take them away, last.

How can change happen if no one speaks loudly that they want it? If we sit quietly for the next four years, will that encourage the DNC to nominate a progressive firebrand? Or are we going to get another Clinton, or Kerry, or Gore?

I am gonna take a quick aside to eat some crow here, I thought Hillary Clinton was our best choice for president, even now I believe she would have done a good job. But given how things turned out, I think perhaps we would have been better off with a third party run from Sanders, even though it would have ended with the same result in the end at least there would have been strong enough support that the establishment would have to take the idea of a true progressive running seriously going forward.

Anyway where was I? Protesting, right, so no, being quiet, and polite, and waiting your turn doesn't fucking help when the turn you are waiting for is to have basic human rights. The fact that people are mad needs to be in the national spotlight, it needs to be there constantly, this was the strategy of the Trump campaign and look how that turned out.

Right now I hear that the current protest in Portland is more of a riot, with damaged property and so on, and while I find myself unable to explicitly advocate for that, I find it hard to condemn as a bad tactic either, if nothing else it isn't hiding the fact that people are mad. The way I see it, in four years, or two for the midterms I guess, our possible leaders will have two possible electorates to look at, there is the quiet electorate patiently waiting for compromise, or the electorate that burned the cities and is on the way to the voting booth.

Which of those is more likely to encourage change?