Protests work when your protest hits them where they live.
Teachers strike? Who cares. Oh, except now every voter with children has a pressing day care emergency â phones ring in the capitol and lawmakers (reluctantly) do their fucking jobs.
Protestors demand less militarized policing? Who gives a fuck. Oh, except now theyâve shut down traffic to a major transportation hub on a holiday. Maybe some phones will ring in the capitol this time.
Amen. I used to worry about the wisdom of such dramatic protests, but not any more. If a protest is to have any impact on future policy, it has to (as you said) really affect peopleâs daily lives. The last protest on Lakeshore Drive received a great deal of media attention in Chicago, but one protest isnât enough to produce real change. Keep it up!
Prostesting Pro-Tip: Donât make people late for their jobs, dates, or other appointments. If someone is on an expressway then they probably have someplace they need to be. If you hold them up then they will get pissed off. People who are angry at you are less likely to listen to you. In fact theyâll probably think your a prick. Then when they finally arrive at their destination theyâll tell everyone, âsorry guys, the expressway was backed up because of those fucking protestors!â
Once youâve attained the category of âthose fucking xârs,â youâre in an out group. The other. Youâre not like them. They will vote against you.
Hit whom where they live? Exactly whom is this protest supposed to be targeting? Tourists? People trying to drive to the mall? NW suburbanites? Are any of them responsible for the violence plaguing certain neighborhoods? âYeah, if we fuck up traffic and scare away the tourists, thatâll show âem!â Show them what, they never manage to say.
They should be protesting the gun makers, gun sellers, and gang members â everyone knows who they are and where they live. That would be a much more effective protest â you know, hitting them where they live and all, right?
I could drive you to several spots on West Division or West Augusta right now where, at this very moment, there are dozens of gang members hanging out literally in the middle of the street peddling drugs and guns. That would be a much more effective target for protest â imagine how quickly that scourge could end if tens thousands of protestors flooded the streets day and night and shamed the drug and gun sellers?
Cops on bicycles are already on site near the Cumberland Ave. on-ramp to I-90 West, ready to block any pedestrian trying to walk down it.
Totally justified outrages to protest.
Totally wrong approach to protest.
The scourge wouldnât end or be shamed. It would just relocate.
I had a friend who was a neighborhood activist in Independence Park for about 8 years in the 1990âs. He organized all sorts of activities to keep residents visible and got more policing in the area. He got the area crime rate down, but the cops told him the activity had simply moved further west and north.
I know what you mean. The areas I mention get raided every once in a while, and the open-air drug markets disappear briefly, only to reappear a few blocks away, and then reappear in their original location a few weeks after that. The common elements in all the troubled neighborhoods are guns and gangs. Until a means of ridding these dual scourges is devised through a community and law enforcement partnership, instead of âf- the policeâ versus âitâs all their own faultâ competing idiocies, all the new grocery stores and Gaps wonât make a difference.
You have a point, but . . . these Chicago protests have been planned with proper legal authority and communicated to the public ahead of time. They are also organized so as not to completely shut down any major thruway - they shut down one lane to make their point. At the previous protest on Lakeshore Drive, Gov. Rauner tried to violate the terms of the approved protest by having the police start arresting protestors and even the Chicago Police wouldnât do that.
The protest is wrapping up (weâre getting storms). Looks like 40-50 protesters were there, about a dozen arrests.
Come on now, youâve driven through construction zones with one lane open. If the protestors shut down one lane then expressway traffic will grind to a crawl.
Itâs such a terrible protesting strategy that I actually wonder if the organizers might be paid Trump supporters who aim to turn the public against Democrats for the fall elections.