I 100% support the right to peaceful protest. I wish we had more protests. There are so many things that really need protesting, and I mean big large scale protest like back in the days of MLK with a million people marching down the National Mall.
A big part of the point of protest is to get people to join your side. Stopping traffic is like throwing spray paint in an art museum. It turns people against you. Whether it should be legal or not, it’s a really dumb protest tactic.
You want to protest against cars? Fine. But if you do that by blocking the road, you just create more pollution from everybody sitting in traffic. And I promise not one of those people sitting in traffic is going to ever think that your cause is legitimate after that. They are going to hate you and everything you stand for.
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
I 100% support the right to peaceful protest. I wish we had more protests. There are so many things that really need protesting, and I mean big large scale protest like back in the days of MLK with a million people marching down the National Mall. A big part of the point of protest is to get people to join your side. Stopping traffic is like throwing spray paint in an art museum. It turns people against you. Whether it should be legal or not, it’s a really dumb protest tactic.
You want to protest against cars? Fine. But if you do that by blocking the road, you just create more pollution from everybody sitting in traffic. And I promise not one of those people sitting in traffic is going to ever think that your cause is legitimate after that. They are going to hate you and everything you stand for.
If you’re gonna cite MLK…
“Mlk did it right!”
Mlk famously blocked roads, it’s like his main thing outside of the dream speaches.
“Not like that.”