Summer of Rage

[CousinIT]

. . . .We’ve spent the last week hearing mewlings of concern over interrupted dinners and movie nights of Trump administration officials out on the town. In the wake of DSA protesters heckling Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and presidential adviser Stephen Miller at Mexican eateries, and the decision of one restaurant owner in Virginia not to serve Trump’s spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Washington Post editorialized that these White House power players should “be allowed to eat dinner in peace.” After all, the Post wondered, “how hard is it to imagine” how those on the left might feel if “people who strongly believe that abortion is murder” decided not to let them “live peaceably with their families”?

The hold that the minority has on every realm of power — economic, social, sexual — is so pervasive and assumed that we don’t even notice when the few oppress the many.
What remained unimaginable to the editorial writers was the reality those who protect abortion rights — not to mention those who simply avail themselves of reproductive health-care services — face regular death threats, are screamed at while walking into clinics; reproductive health-care workers have been among the victims of clinic shootings and bombings and, of course, abortion doctors have been assassinated. In 2014 the Supreme Court enshrined the right to harass women entering clinics by ruling that buffer zones between protesters and patients weren’t required. In a brilliant New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg argued that the Post’s failure to acknowledge these forms of harassment was symptomatic of the “reflexive false balance” of the mainstream political media, but I think it’s more than that: The hold that the minority has on every realm of power — economic, social, sexual — is so pervasive and assumed that we don’t even notice when the few oppress the many. It’s invisible, and any show of defiance against that power is what stands out as aberrant and dangerous.

Just look at how freaked out the Democratic Party leadership got about California representative Maxine Waters. Last weekend, she urged supporters in California to “show up wherever we have to show up,” suggesting “if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Waters was not advocating violence; she was calling for assembly and pushback, a refusal to normalize the abuses being enacted by an administration that has separated more than 3,000 migrant children from their parents, and is building detention centers in which to hold asylum-seeking families indefinitely.

Waters was not popping off, making some careless remark. She has a long history of respecting the fury of the politically, socially, and economically powerless, of understanding how feelings of hopelessness can heat to a boiling point. Back in 1992, after the acquittal of four white cops in the brutal beating of black taxi driver Rodney King provoked looting and fires in Los Angeles, many in the media and local politics were quick to label the events as riots, to throw around the term “thugs.” The original violence done to King by white male agents of the state — and the lack of consequences they faced — was practically forgotten, while black fury in response to the toleration of police brutality was framed as the only violence being done. . . .

https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/summer-of-rage.html

[stonecutter357]

1. LOCK HIM UP!