I went to the first Women’s March in NYC, and all I could think was how ludicrous it was that we had a pre-assigned path with street closures announced in advance, and yesterday’s march was no different. I kept comparing it to when we marched, organically, after the Mike Brown murder verdict, after the Eric Garner murder verdict. We took over streets. We shut down parts of Manhattan, tunnels and roads in and out of the city.

And people were PISSED. Even rich liberals were up in arms yelling about how they couldn’t get across town (boo hoo). The marches weren’t there to put pictures on social media— they were there to disrupt people’s daily experience. The problem was that they kept to the same routes, to the point where it became expected. We let the cops guide us too much by the later days and the tactic lost effectiveness. It got cold.

@SuzanEraslan It always bugged me that cops lead a protest, but I wasn’t sure why. This is why. A cop-lead protest is a Disney Riot.

@rotatingskull Oh my god, that’s EXACTLY what it is. Child safe political inaction. A street carnival of catharsis.

We never marched through the Upper East Side, for example, which I always thought was a mistake. By the end, we were just marching among like minded people, again. Here we go through the Village and NYU students; here we go through Times Square where there’s already a million people, anyway; here we go through the liberal Upper West Side to Columbia U to Harlem.

The best days, the days where it felt like people had to listen, were when we took the highways, when we shut down 5th Ave., when we blocked the bridges and tunnels.

They were also the days when I was most scared, when I experienced first hand that cops are NOT your friends and will intimidate, physically threaten, and rush you en masse to then arrest you for running from a weapon wielding threat of violence.

Every time I see a post thanking the cops for how they acted during a “political protest,” it makes me fucking ill.

@SuzanEraslan comparing your experience (and those of others) with the palpable blind terror in cops’ faces as thousands of people descended on Chicago’s airport (which is NOT a convenient trip for anyone) in a spontaneous travel ban protest and literally shut down the terminal is illuminating

the power of a protest is how quickly it can turn into a riot, and they drained it of power before the event started

@r4v5 Oh, yeah, see, THIS is a protest (similar thing with the actions at JFK and Newark here in New York— you can’t even access either by subway!) and all the other international airports where this happened, again, ORGANICALLY and WITHOUT state approval. These were protests, not spectacles of catharsis.

@r4v5 @SuzanEraslan I feel like I keep saying it, but liberals’ inability to come to terms with the nature of power is what keeps losing.

Power is real. Liberals keep telling us it’s not. But power is real.

@r4v5 @SuzanEraslan Unions are the same. The mere threat that you could just all walk out of work at the same time terrifies them so much that they made unions impossible to organize. A strike is functionally an organized riot — a very safe riot. But it disrupts their illusion of control and so liberals and conservatives made damned sure you can’t form a union.

@rotatingskull @r4v5 They not only stopped additional organizing, they made it illegal for unions to strike if they are to be legally recognized! Though the new SCOTUS ruling may have actually undermined that inadvertently. 😈

@SuzanEraslan

I'd add one thing... I think a permit can be a strategic decision that is valid. I'm not talking about massive noise demos to make liberals feel better about going about their week

Our May Day event this year, we had a permit. We did this for safety of kids / families / etc cause PPB attacked us last yr.

That was a valid choice and it surely wasn't a parade. Also 1M ppl in streets means 1M ppl to reach

@SuzanEraslan The last truly epic protest I’ve seen like that was the big Iraq War protest. Seeing highway bridges shut down was outstanding. It was the largest human gathering of any kind in history.

Then the war happened anyway. I never really protested since then.

@rotatingskull Yeah, I definitely didn’t protest between that and the Ferguson verdict because it was so fucking demoralizing. For the Ferguson verdict march, I literally took to the street because after a full 17 minutes of hanging my head in my hands in silent rage, I felt like my body was going to tear itself apart if I didn’t move.

@rotatingskull About 15 of us were separated from a large group and standing on a median between 125th St. and the entrance to the bridge. 34 (I counted!) cops, who had stood with their batons out across from us, slapping them in their hands, refusing to answer our questions about what they expected us to do, bum rushed us, nearly breaking my leg as we were forced over a low brick wall.

@rotatingskull A guy threw his water bottle in the air in a moment of just pure, instinctual panic, and two cops grabbed him while another hit him with a baton. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen first hand, and that was when I realized, forever, that these people are not our friends, and they are not here to protect us during marches. They’re there to contain us.

@rotatingskull @SuzanEraslan I once had a conversation with a govvie inside the DC Beltway back in '06 about that. He said that they took it as a sign that were actually doing the right thing - if the little people were angry, it was working.

@drwho @SuzanEraslan This is a very common attitude among our representatives.

@rotatingskull @SuzanEraslan The govvie in question was an AD of DHS. Don't know where in the power structure of the time, though.

@drwho @SuzanEraslan Ah. Here in the USA this is par foe the course. Congresspeople delight in angering their constituents and take it as proof they are doing a good job. Especially liberals. Pissing off both sides equally means that you’re perfectly in the middle, right?

@drwho @SuzanEraslan I’m still not sure how it was decided that perfectly in the middle is the best. But the result is always something awful like another War or cutting services. Whenever I hear anyone say “extremism is bad” I know they’re one of these cryptofascists or cryptolibertarians or cryptosomething.

Cowards hide in the middle of the crowd.

@SuzanEraslan

Approved protests serve a function but they are not the same as civil disobedience protests.