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| A sign of these times Curfews, protests, coronavirus data, parks re-opening. |
Lot of young people involved this time, yay! We need them to be engaged, we need them to vote.
People are pissed OFF about so much and this historic racial injustice has resonated with the injustice of the Administration's lack of response to the pandemic, their willingness to simply discard our lives. This is nothing new to black or brown Americans, of course, but now everyone gets to feel some of the sting of such disregard. And we want the powers-that-be to know and care about these injustices. Hooray for all the shared materials and links on how to be an Anti-racist.
People are not working or working very little. Students aren't constrained within a school. Folks and families have time on their hands. They can get to a march, they can read literature and articles by black authors, they can watch movies and documentaries that explicate the dynamics.
As I remember it, one of the forces at play in the 60's riots were the high numbers of unemployed young folks, especially young men and particularly in the industrial east and mid-west cities. The steel mills were closing, releasing thousands of young men, many who were black, for whom this job secured their economic place in the social order. Perhaps the young white men from the steel mills were able to get other gainful employment, but I'm thinking that for young black men, this was much more of a challenge. At any rate, there were a lot of young men of all persuasions in their late teens and twenties suddenly with a lot of "leisure" time. And now we have students who aren't in school, families who aren't working, jobs that can be done flexibly from home. Now people have the time and ability to protest - and they do so responsibly, too, with proper distancing, wearing masks, not whooping or hollering so much.
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Noise makers!