• 2 Posts
  • 109 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
Cake day: June 10th, 2024
  • agent_nycto@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why aren't there mass protests in the USA?
    505·
    13 days ago

    Ok so everyone wants one, right? Feels like it’ll be dramatic and big and change and fix everything, even if it gets violent.

    But there’s problems with that, not only in execution but also results.

    One problem is the US is massive. It would take almost as much planning as a moon landing to effectively organize a protest that large, even if you only do the continental 48 states. Some of those states alone are as large as some European countries, some are larger, so the size alone gets in the way of things.

    Then you have the problem with getting all the people protesting to agree to a cohesive protest. Where to protest, what to protest specifically about, and to have a solid list of demands. Trying to get that amount of people to agree on anything alone would be huge. Like my mother says, it’s like herding cats.

    And then there’s the matter of getting that info out there. Occupy wall Street and BLM did have a comprehensive list of demands but the media pretended they didn’t. Almost all media is owned by like, six corporations, so even getting the instructions for that protest would be incredibly hard. And lest people forget, those media companies are final, so most of the media in other countries hearing about this will have just as much information surpression and do already. So it would be incredibly hard to get a comprehensive plan, demands, and instructions out el to everyone.

    Also don’t forget that we have the technological spying that didn’t exist before. Cameras are everywhere. Not only in your phone, but on almost every street. People even put those Ring doorbells on their homes and that company sells it’s video footage to the police, and doesn’t turn off, so any protest could be monitored and nipped in the bud. We have whole agencies devoted to surpressing protests and entire handbooks in infiltrating them.

    Then there’s logistics and provisions. Most Americans can’t afford to travel, much less take a week or two off of work, or a month, to protest long term. We can barely afford to keep ourselves fed with what we’re getting paid, and if we were protesting in one specific location, most of us couldn’t take the time to get there much less afford to. We have to feed the majority of almost an entire continent in one location for an extended period of time.

    And if it was one specific location, the hospitals, hotels, grocery stores and restaurants would be so overwhelmed that they couldn’t handle everyone.

    Speaking of hospitals, if, as in when, the police and military attacked the protest, most people could never afford the medical treatment to be able to get patched up, much less their lives saved.

    And speaking of the police and military, we have the most militarized police force on the planet. Our police don’t have just batons, they have live rounds of ammunition and full on tanks. And they are more than willing to use them on civilians, especially in protesters. Look up Blair Mountain and the Kent State shooting. Not only could this crush a protest, but people would have to be ok with the idea they would very likely die.

    And our prison system, being for profit, would salivate at the idea of getting more slave labor en masse, and the current administration is more than happy to detain people over trivial things. So everyone would have to be ok with life imprisonment if they didn’t get shot.

    On top of that, not everyone is on board. About a third to a half of the country is in favor of what’s happening and have a cult around Trump and Musk. A lot of people voted for this and are in favor of it, because they really, really hate the liberals, Democrats, gays, minorities, etc. There’s a whole media pipeline for this that they listen to, especially young people who normally are the type to protest this stuff. So there would be resistance from civilians on top of not everyone being in favor of the protest.

    Then there’s the problem of what that protest would actually accomplish. Even if you pulled it off, because of the supply issues, it would be short lived. Maybe a week or two, being surpressed by the military and police, and demonized in the media. The oligarchs would simply wait it out. It wouldn’t enact long term change, even if everyone could agree with what they want changed in the first place. So it might not be effective even if it was pulled off.

    And the primary opposition party, which should be doing anything, has adapted a strategy of self preservation. Concede to the fascists for now, bide your time, then come election season tell everyone that you are the better and only choice (because winner takes all so they are the only alternative) and hope for a blue wave in four years. Can’t make any changes if you’re not in power, so do what you can to keep it now and believe that if things get bad enough now people will come crawling back. So very little actual support for a protest would come from on top.

    And then, if we look at history, a lot of rebellions needed other countries to support them in order to be successful. Most of them had outside influence from other major powers. The other major powers right now are either in favor of the government, turning fascist themselves, or if they did intervene would risk starting a war with the US which has the biggest military in the history of humanity. So not a lot of help would come from the outside, if any.

    So while we also would like a massive protest, there are huge issues in the way of effectively pulling it off.

    So what’s been happening has been local efforts. You might not hear about town hall protests or stuff in individual state capitals in other countries, but those smaller fires are burning. There’s been economic protests, like the backlash against Tesla and the no buying day, which apparently was started to get people to dip their toes into a national protest. There’s been a lot of smaller community organizing, which hopefully adds up. I think and hope there will be more individual direct action, perhaps more Luigi strategies on specific individuals, as things get worse. Maybe more guerilla tactics, French resistance style efforts, are what is going to happen rather than a massive protest.

    Tldr: We ARE doing stuff here. We hate this more than anyone. The change will have to come in less exciting ways than a big, national rebellion, so sorry you’re not getting as much of a spectacle, we’d like that, too, but there’s a lot of prep work that would need to be done to pull it off that needs to happen first. We aren’t sitting by and letting this happen, and we are working towards fixing things.

  • agent_nycto@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Fascism is un-American
    24·
    1 month ago

    I’m talking about the shared cultural values of the society we have today, views shared by most Americans. Most Americans like free speech. Most Americans like liberty. Et cetera and so on. These are things that are part of our culture. You aren’t any less of a person for recognizing that these are values that are held by this culture.

    I am also saying that despite culturally sharing in these values, our society also fails to actually support them in very big ways.