Pierce: What I Saw in Boston on Saturday

[mcar]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57119/boston-protest/

What happened on Saturday was vast. It contained multitudes. It was mainly peaceful, but not entirely. It was portrayed as a kind of spontaneous outburst of resistance to an admittedly pathetic "Free Speech Rally" by some phony libertarians at the Bulfinch Bandstand in another part of the Common's vast green space. This has allowed some of the usual suspects—Hi, Dana Loesch! Look, there's Ben Shapiro!—to frame the whole day for their followers as a rally against "free speech." But, if you walked the route, as I did, from Malcolm X Boulevard in Roxbury to downtown, you quickly realized that the event was aimed at the whole panoply of issues that the election of the president* has brought into sharp focus, from mass incarceration, to his bipolar military blithering, his reflexive anti-intellectualism, and to the various poisons that have entered the political bloodstream with his very presence as their suspension vehicle...

This is the hidden history of Boston, the inconvenient brawling history, the history of racial solidarity and racial unrest, of machine politics and endless rebellion. Samuel Adams and that bunch were not polite. They were not civil. Not 20 yards from where the monument to the 54th Massachusetts stands, William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and burned a copy on the State House steps. At the same time, the old WASP establishment and the Irish machines that succeeded them did minority citizens of Boston no great favors and, when everything exploded in the busing riots in 1975, those minority citizens were the ones who were least surprised.

Saturday was different. The march was a great, sprawling conglomeration of people and causes and ideas. The march itself was well-organized and well-controlled. All along the route, the members of the Boston Police Department were firm, but remarkably amiable. (I have lived long enough to see a Boston cop pose with a guy wearing a tutu.) It coursed from the old Roxbury, through the boutique blocks of the gentrified South End, and up toward the Common. There was chanting and singing and by the time most of the marchers got to the Common, the original "Free Speech rally" was long gone...

There were several of these incidents as the afternoon wore on in what really was a roasting pan of a day. Supporters of the abortive rally would get spotted and a crowd would gather, chanting at them. Boston police would then escort the person out of the crowd, helped immeasurably by the members of the Boston affiliate of Black Lives Matter, who did a wonderful job all day maintaining order.

[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

[SonofDonald]

2. Speaking of the 54th Massachusets.

As I type this I'm watching the movie "Glory", I haven't seen it for a few years so with this national disgrace of bigoted, useless ner-do-wells rearing up out of the slime again I felt it was time.

We are different from them, we are in the right, we are what this nation should be.

These bastards need to become extinct, to be ridiculed at every opportunity, to be thrown on the trash heap of time.

And BTW, "Glory" is a great movie.

[mcar]

3. It's a wonderful movie

I still remember the score.