Sharpton 'outraged' at fatal NYPD police shootings

[Ken Burch]

89. In any cause with broad-based support and involvement, there will always be multiple factions.

And there will always be multiple groups of crazies and fanatics who show up on the edges to attempt to attach themselves to the cause in question, simply to get attention.

In the anti-Vietnam War movement, for example, there were all sorts of views, ranging from the Adlai Stevenson liberalism of the Eugene McCarthy campaign to the Sparticists(a group who showed up in antiwar rallies in 1970 holding signs that said "All of Southeast Asia MUST be Communist by 1971"-although they didn't say what they'd do if it wasn't).

Extreme divisions existed in the black freedom movement(Dr. King vs. the Panthers)the early 70's feminist movement(NOW on the moderate center-left to the feminist-anarchists of Redstockings-both of which had a lot of interesting and valid things to say), and in the LGBTQ rights movement(from the Mattachine Society, which was just barely non-closeted at all, to the Gay Liberation Front, the group whose calls for "the abolition of the family" are still thrown at gay activists today by the religious Right as if all gays support that objective, to gay and lesbian separatist movements whose views echoed those of the black separatists a few years earlier).

It's not possible to get one absolutely unified "line" for any movement...and there are always folks who show up who are mainly there, for whatever reasons, to cause some sort of trouble(or various infiltrators).

So, again, it's not fair at all to blame people like Sharpton and the 99% of the anti-police violence movement who've been absolutely nonviolent for the deaths of those policemen, horrible as those killings were.

And no good would come of ending the anti-police violence movement and allowing police violence to win in the name of asserting purity, which it sounds like you would like to see happen(unless I've got you wrong).