Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, many peoples' nomination for NBA basketball's GOAT, and I are the same age. We both came up in California in the 1960s. In this moment of Trump's attempted military coup in our state and nation, he speaks for me.
... I grew up in a time of massive political unrest that changed the country from a fortress guarding the wealthy and their rules that benefited only them to a country that questioned those rules and the authorities enforcing them. Protests advocating for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and ending the Vietnam War were daily occurrences. That shock to the system of seeing hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to demand change jump-started America into a nation that was more aware of injustice and more committed to addressing it.
Protest is an act of love, not one of anger.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis (1940-2020), civil rights activist
As a human rights activist for 60 years, I’m used to the predictable pattern of protests and the inevitable backlash. People who are outraged by the government’s deliberate and callous acts of injustice march through the streets to raise public awareness and gather enough support to end the injustice. They do this after realizing that they will not be getting any help from most elected politicians, who are too afraid of compromising their jobs to do what’s right.
Instead, the government party in charge wants to demonstrate to its supporters that they are powerful and can protect the status quo against change. As they did in the sixties, they send in cops and troops to force a violent confrontation. This then justifies any action the government takes because now they have news footage of violent protesters. The result of this carefully manipulated photo-op violence is the curated disapproval and scolding by politicians relieved to have an excuse to reject protesters. Thousands of lives are being destroyed, but it only takes one burning car to allow people to justify their lack of involvement.
Lost in all this political theater is the injustice that was being protested.
This government was founded on protest.
Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), first Black Supreme Court justice
No matter how peaceful protesters want to be, it rarely ends up that way. There are too many people who benefit from having it turn violent. First, some infiltrators are the political enemies of the protesters who commit violent acts to discredit the cause. Second, there are hardcore radicals who agree with the principles of the protesters but don’t agree that their non-violent methods produce change fast enough. Third, the police and troops who should be trained in how to de-escalate violence after all these years of facing protests, know that de-escalation is not why they were sent in. Their job is to punish protesters to scare others from protesting. Ironically, they are there to protect a political party’s power, not protect the country.
So, yeah, protests are messy, impure, sloppy, and emotional. For many, it is a last resort born out of frustration, anger, and disappointment for a country that has not lived up to the promise it makes every time it hoists a flag. They see a felon for a president who has been accused of sexual assault more than two dozen times, who has used his office to increase his personal wealth, who dishonors the U.S. Constitution to gain more power, who ignores the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to cleanse the country of immigrants, legal and illegal, who demands law and order, yet pardons horrible criminals who cheated average people out of millions, and others who invaded the Capitol Building. That’s who we picked as our leader and guardian of our values.
When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), Civil Rights Movement leader
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