#the american spirit has always been one of anti-authority not pro-bullying

[gameshowtrainwreck]

A country founded by a bunch of drunk assholes wrecking private property (and worshipped by those who see their thoughts and deeds as immutable and sacred) do not understand why people would riot; beyond, of course, what they've openly concluded as self-destructive greed (half will say that it's because of indoctrination or ignorance because those speakers are incredibly stupid; the other half will say it is innate, born within the rioters because those speakers are incredibly racist).

I feel like there are some things that needed to be mentioned in order to temper one's perspective on history.

(tw: descriptions of violence as part of historical context, plus delivered in a really fuckin sarcastic tone about all of it because of fucking course we are going to repeat history that's just as much a part of humanity as infinite as our imagination)

I do not see riots, particularly the ones happening in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the wake of George Floyd being slowly, publicly, and extrajudicially executed by a cop (who probably got trained by some bloodthirsty ghoul up the pecker order who went to Israel, if his murderer wasn't trained by the IDF himself) as failures on the part of the citizens but rather the absolute and utter failures of the local civil leadership (from the Floyd murderer's commanding officers, to the mayor and city council) on a multitude of ways. The most glaring and galling of these failures was in openly ignoring demands for justice when a known quantity and frequent bad actor decided qualified immunity would cover him like it did all the other times it covered him before; and the sumbitch pleading under his knee really deserved it for holding a fake (looking but entirely real) twenty dollar bill and being disrespectful when denying he had done any wrongdoing.

To whom much is given, much is required. The higher up the chain you are, the higher the standard you should be held to. And apparently used to be held to, if the propaganda I've been exposed to all my life held any basis in reality. Don't tolerate asshole leaders, don't tolerate lesser evil, don't tolerate *any* fucking evil. Examine your place in it and look for ways to mitigate it if that shit bothers you, don't shout down somebody else because they put you in cognitive dissonance, sort that shit out in your own fucking head.

Need help? Think of it this way: If it's something you wouldn't want to happen to you but you're okay with it to happening to somebody else (which would also include 'if it happens to them, it will prevent it from happening to me'), that is the literal textbook example of evil (with or without the 'coward' status effect).

The poor value their lives and the lives of those around them because it's all they have that has been of any real worth to them. The powerful don't value the lives of the poor as much as they value their property. There have been a number of times in history where the poor have shown their betters how much more disposable property can be: The multiple seccessio plebuses during the Roman Republic, the peasants' revolt in England, the French revolution... And that's the stuff off the top of my head from before the industrial age.

Does that mean I'm gonna join a riot myself? More than likely not, I don't look to start shit. Sometimes trauma makes you try to use every tool at your disposal before it gets to that point. I just think anybody seeing a potential storm on the horizon and feeling a change in their broken bones will feel a duty to warn everyone around them that their pattern recognition is kicking in again in ways certainly stronger than mere pareidolia. Never mind that apart from a couple of rare and infrequent exceptions, rural American riots historically have involved the kind of goings-on the song Strange Fruit was about, and motherfuck that abhorrent horseshit; the klan started in Central Tennessee, not East Tennessee tyvm.

Besides, my jive is more with stuff like the Battle of Athens (1946). That was some good, old-fashioned, motherfucking siege warfare with a textbook Hollywood plotline: GIs come home from WWII and found the local political machine running roughshod over their kin, GIs do things by the book (including putting a ticket of GIs for local offices) while the machine used the sheriff's dept to bully everybody around.

Election day comes, poll watchers for the GIs start getting arrested for undisclosed 'federal offenses' while the deputies seize three ballot boxes. GIs wired the governor and the U.S. A.G. for help on ensuring a fair count, and they go unanswered (surprise, surprise). GIs figure they got to do something, so they decide to arm up, mount up, and lay siege to the county jail to force an honest count and release the poll watchers before the state militia could mobilize and shut them down in the morning.

A lotta gunfire exchanges, and sometime around 3:30am and the third charge of dynamite against the jailhouse, the deputies surrendered. The machine was actually trying to rig the election but the true count had the GIs winning.

It's a cute story...

...but it's also a situation that could be almost the polar opposite of how things are today. The bad guys were unorganized beyond the chain of corruption that linked them all, the GIs used their military training. Compare that to today where the corruption enabled them to fund the paramilitary training. The GIs had the benefit of slower lines of communication. Any rebellion today would not. Most of the 'reforms' that have happened in elections have been more or less to speed up the certification process and make things more difficult at the voter's end. If it happens fast enough, you can still say the process is fair while also blocking any and all transparency to the voting process, right? (Liberals love the appearance of legitimacy more than they like actually being legitimate, but I have no standing on the topic as I have always admitted to being an absolute bastard.)

I would love to be wrong, and I always hope I am, but life experience has taught me more than other people's words have been able to counter.