Athenae, Kids Today

Get In The Streets All You OTHER People

Jesus H, unless you are literally tweeting from the American streets, stop telling other people to get in the streets.

Look, I am as outraged about Trump as anyone, and I’ve actually been in the streets multiple times in the past year, but I get irritated at revolutionaries who want to yell about how apathetic everybody ELSE is, like, charter a bus and sign people up, then. Stop being disgusted with the rest of us and set a damn example. And once you’ve done that, shut the fuck up about how everybody else is bad at this.

It’s like the endless declarations of despair over gun violence, or feminism’s failings, or anything else. All it does is make everybody feel like shit, suppress actual action (because if we’re awful losers who can’t do anything, why bother, especially when there’s TV) and make people who are doing the hard work of fighting this shit invisible.

People ARE in the streets. I live in a major metro area in the near-bluest state in the union and goddamn, people are in the streets every fucking day. Don’t disappear them because the protests aren’t as big as you think they should be or as big as your parents told you the 1960s protests were or as big as the March on Washington photos or whatever the fuck else. The perfect crowd doesn’t exist. Join the crowd that does.

Or don’t, but quit shitting on the crowd because it’s not the one you think should exist.

A.

2 thoughts on “Get In The Streets All You OTHER People”

  2. “A ballot is just a substitute for a bullet. If your vote isn’t backed by a bullet, it is meaningless. Without the bullet, people could ignore the election outcome. Voting would be pointless. Democracy has violence at its very core!” ~Muir Matteson, “The Nonviolent Zone”
    “An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
    “Working within the system means to become a part of the system. When you go into the voting booth, the only meaningful significance that your action will have is to show that one more person supports the state”. ~Mark Davis
    “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” Herbert Marcuse
    “If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds … its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos.” ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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