Angry Driver Runs Over Protesters

[IronLionZion]

15. Why highways have become the center of civil rights protest

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-highways-have-become-the-center-of-civil-rights-protest/?utm_term=.b6e09f98bfc0

"If you can find a way to jam up a highway — literally have the city have a heart attack, blocking an artery — it causes people to stand up and pay attention," said Nathan Connolly, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. "Highways still perform their historic role from a half-century ago. They help people move very easily across these elaborately segregated landscapes."

Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than would a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials.

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It's more of a size and scale problem. Dr. King marched in the streets (as did lots of white liberals for anti-war, occupy, etc.) but it was organized large marches with a specific goal in mind, to end the idiotic Jim Crow laws and segregation. We still have some of that btw. I didn't have my first white coworker until my early 30s and lived in cheap apartment complexes where nobody is white. Dr. King and his followers took beatings, dog bites, and even got shot and killed because someone didn't want them to vote or go to school or sit next to them at a lunch counter.

BLM and other groups now might have honorable intentions, but not the same level of organization or specific goals they can articulate. "stop killing us" is not specific since America is a killing nation that kills like it's our way of life.

So this is probably why a lot of liberals don't sympathize with the young idealists blocking traffic for an ambiguous cause, and many well-intentioned liberals are irritated by sitting patiently in traffic in their luxury imported hybrid cars coming home from a hard day's work in a nice air-conditioned office job with health insurance and 401K to pay their mortgage on a house they own and share progressive thoughts on blogs like DU while sipping fair trade soy lattes before planning out their next European vacation. It forces people like me to think about it and talk about it. The first question has to be someone asking why?

Part of it is that the All Lives Matter folks go online and share vivid fantasies of ending the lives of people through driving over them or shooting them. Probably pro-life too.