When did I become an activist? When did you? I think all good children of the 1960s absorbed the idea that we were supposed to have an activist side. I wasn't identifiable as a protester, but sympathized with friends' protests...at twelve? Ten? When my parents went back to the land, which was an act of protest, and I agreed with them, was that an act of activism...at age five? When Ralph Nader's USPIRG awarded me "activist" as a job title, back in the Reagan Administration, I wasn't doing anything new; I was just learning more grown-up, professional, payable ways of doing it.
So, shortly after my first round of college education, I took a side of the only serious dispute I remember in Takoma Park, Maryland, town meetings. Takomans tended to be very mellow, liberal, live-and-let-live sort of people. Town meetings were sometimes called just to watch major events on the big-screen television at the town hall, and featured dogs, babies, sing-alongs, and potluck dinners. Then there was the debate about whether Takoma Park and Bethesda should accept or oppose a county ordinance that would force some people to stop renting out rooms, and some people to move out of those towns. That led to a series of very different kinds of town meetings.
I was passionately opposed to the county ordinance because (1) it interfered with people's choices, which is morally wrong in any case, and (2) the towns that had already enacted it had caused enough working people to become homeless residents of D.C. shelters. The former mayor, who had given Takoma Park much of its character, was also opposed to the ordinance. At least one town council member, Marc Elrich by name, was opposed to it. Some others were undecided; some others, and the new mayor, favored the ordinance because it was no secret that the people who'd have to leave Takoma Park wouldn't be missed. And because more regulations, especially regulations that reduced the number of poor people in the town, would supposedly "boost property values." Oh, how everyone I knew sneered at the idea of allowing anyone to be homeless in the name of "praaah-perty val-yews!"
A group of people organized opposition to the ordinance. Funnily enough the former mayor, Sam Abbott, who was some sort of relative of Mother's and whom I liked, was not part of this group; nor was "our" councilman. The leaders of the group were thirty-year-old hippie-types whom I'd seen around town but didn't know well. They were fiery and strident and enthusiastic, and wanted to do protests with picket signs and sit-ins and all. They also advised people to maintain the beautiful homes and gardens tourists drove through town on weekends to admire, which sounded good; and of course the protests were to be nonviolent, which was good.
Then I found out firsthand how people who are looking for a fight can ruin a good nonviolent protest.
We went into a town meeting, a relatively formal one late in the evening. Song sheets were passed around. Well, it was Takoma Park; that was not unusual. On cue we were all supposed to sing a lot of new verses to "We Shall Not Be Moved." That, too, sounded totally Takoman and nice.
The new mayor and council were seated on a stage at the front of the hall, with spotlights and microphones. They read the county ordinance and began to discuss it.
One of the opposition group, a premenopausal type of woman, bounded up on stage, grabbed a microphone from a councilman who'd been taught never to hit a female, and shouted something to the effect that "We're all here to let you know that WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED!" And she gave us our cue to sing.
In any large group of Takomans singing was likely to happen. So it did. "Go tell Sidney Kramer, we shall not be moved..." The town council politely listened to several verses of this serenade.
Then, seizing his moment, "our" councilman rose to speak on behalf of our side. But, for whatever reason, the loud woman refused to step away from center stage or surrender the microphone. We'd sung all the verses and she kept bellowing, "We shall not, we shall not be moved!" over and over. It was embarrassing.
I heard another woman bellowing, "Hear the man out!"--and that was I. And I didn't have a microphone and the louder activist didn't seem to hear me at all. A lot of shouting was going on. Everyone was unpleasantly surprised. Serenading the town council was just a Takoma Park thing, but had anybody come to a town meeting to be rude? Sam Abbott's passionate intensity, and seniority, might have seemed to him to justify a little shouting, but not that level of rudeness. The loud woman was being nonviolent but she was being utterly un-Takoman.
Some Loyal Opposition types have been expressing, recently, the idea that it's dangerous to bring a knife to a gun fight. That is certainly true. Also, if publicity is important to you, it can be equally dangerous to draw a gun in a knife fight.
You could see the supporters of the county ordinance gloating. They were right! The opponents of the ordinance were horrible, rude, tacky people who deserved to become homeless.
You could see an awful lot of respectable adults who had gone in opposed to the ordinance deciding that the supporters of the ordinance were right. The opponents were horrible, rude, tacky...
After about ten minutes of futile efforts to reclaim the floor in gentle(wo)manly ways, the town council gave up. "We will proceed with our discussion," one of them said unpleasantly, into the clamor. Very few people were still singing but one of those few still had the main microphone. And she kept braying on while the council muttered among themselves, and while one of them yelled, "Vote," and while one of them screamed, "The motion is carried! Five to one in support of the county ordinance!"
I was indignant. On the way out I passed Sam Abbott, who seemed to be having a crisis and who would later be accused of threatening a supporter of the ordinance with his cane. "Is there a God?!" he shouted to me. And that was the last time I ever saw him.
I wanted Marc Elrich to hear what I shouted back about having "come out here to discuss this in an orderly fashion!" My voice was low, my words were parliamentary, and although I'd retired from singing and acting I remembered how to project my voice.
It never seemed to me as if either Sam Abbott or I were yelling at anybody. Only shouting, because the room was so noisy, and because it's just plain wrong to interfere with old people trying to keep their homes by renting out rooms. But next week's town newspaper contained the claims that opponents of the ordinance had been yelling and acting like a mob.
Nobody wrote to refute those claims, although many Takomans would take any possible occasion to write a letter to the editor of the town newspaper about anything, including the weather and the fact that British newspapers printed letters about the weather. The plain sense of the meeting had been changed by the loud activist's rude behavior. At seven o'clock the majority of people in Takoma Park had agreed that the county ordinance was morally intolerable, and at nine o'clock they'd decided that, bad as the county ordinance was, some things and some people might be even worse.
I learned that it is possible to do even a nonviolent protest so badly that it does violence to the cause you are trying to support. I hope I don't have to belabor the application of what I learned thirty years ago to the hot topic of recent news.
Early in January some e-friends from one of the friendlier "conservative" sites, a lot of nice grandparents who post recipes and music and messages of support for one another's family crises, invited me to go to the "rally" on the sixth. "Donald will want to see you!" someone chirped. I didn't care what Donald Trump wanted but I thought it would have been nice to meet these people.
They didn't sound like the type who'd be interested in the sort of political demonstrations that turn into riots, I thought. I was thinking about last year's Second Amendment rally in Richmond, which went exactly as planned. People dressed casually, but for television, went into their state legislators' offices, told the office staff who they were and where they were from, left cards, and politely observed that they (and, optionally, their neighbors) supported the Second Amendment. Then they went out and socialized with one another, might have made time for a little sightseeing or lunch in a restaurant, and went home again. That's how Republicans generally do protests. Especially the ones who are grandparents.
So on the sixth, I was checking the news headlines on Twitter, and...say WHAaaat?! I started tweeting, "Go home, please, get out before it gets worse," and some people did, and others were very obviously, like, "I came to Washington to see the Capitol and I want to see the Capitol. Mavis, would you snap a picture of me standing in my Congressman's doorway in the Capitol?"
Obviously a lot more was going on than the cameras were picking up. I don't doubt that the people who were shouting, stomping, shoving and hitting were raving about commandeering computers and changing votes, or killing Congressmen they didn't like, or who knows what-all. Molesting the Bidens' grandchildren, for all I know. Winning the game for Mother Russia, as in the TV commercial (the one that has a soccer coach say that as evidence that he's not in his right mind). They were troublemakers, they were looking for trouble, they were violent, and very likely they weren't in their right minds. And some of the troublemakers claiming to be Trumpistas had apparently been claiming to be Black Lives Matter demonstrators when they were making trouble at other demonstrations last year.
Do any baby-boomers not remember that from the 1960s? Some people are just troublemakers and will look for any opportunity to turn any gathering into a riot. Probably including their children's wedding and graduation parties--if they know who their children are.
Some claim that some Capitol Police officers, when off camera, were venting their understandable anger on the peaceful demonstrators who were still nonviolently waving flags outside the Capitol.
Some claim that some of the troublemakers had serious plans to blow up the Capitol, or set fires, or who knows what.
Those stories are likely to be true; they're like things that really happened at other riots. But just as we all saw some Capitol Police officers giving a good example for all guards and policemen everywhere, we also saw some Republicans who'd just gone to a nice peaceful rally with the intention of reminding the Democrats not to gloat too much, because their winning the 2020 presidential election was not the result of the majority of Americans supporting anything in the D party agenda except those $600 handouts. This is true and those Republicans had every right to demonstrate it, peaceably, as they did and were doing.
And if you were watching it from the Twitterbird's-eye view, you know that Donald Trump's telling the Republicans to go home in peace, "you are loved," was obviously addressed to the majority of the actual Republicans in the demonstration, who were waving flags, singing, strolling up and down the Mall, and snapping selfies.
When did you, personally, start tweeting pleas for Trump to tell the Republicans to get out of the Capitol? Twitter date-stamps but doesn't time-stamp tweets. I know I tweeted this early in the afternoon; Michael Moore says he started tweeting about this at 1:32 p.m., but this was not his first tweet.
Rubber bullets were allegedly being used on nonviolent demonstrators, inciting some of them to join the violent ones, but so far that doesn't seem to have been proved...It's a matter of record that at this point in the debacle several Republicans were telephoning the White House to ask Trump to call off the demonstration before his people got hurt. Trump was seldom far from Twitter and a lot of us were tweeting at him. I wouldn't expect him to have read or heeded my tweet since I've never been either rich or a supporter of his, but he would have been able to read masses of them.
Tweets like these two wouldn't have been seen by many of the demonstrators, even if they were on Twitter, which the troublemakers obviously were not. But again, anyone in that crowd who was on Twitter would have seen masses of this kind of tweets:
Patriots? Please. I've seen demonstrators looking for "excitement" disrupt a meeting and shift the sense of the meeting, which had been favorable, against them. Trumpistas, please be orderly.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @realDonaldTrump
There is only one true option left.
Patriots are storming the US Capitol and taking it literally back and securing America.
We must call in the US military for support.
Insurrection Act NOW!
Conservative calls for order were flying thick and fast. Among the conservatives on Twitter at the time were Mike Huckabee, Chad Prather, Ted Cruz, Dinesh D'Souza, Jim Jordan, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Hagerty, Mike Lee, Sarah Palin, Mark Levin, even Eric Trump--not to mention many private citizens who are and aren't Trumpistas, whom Trumpistas had learned they could trust--all of us urging the Republican demonstrators to go home and stay out of the riot. But Twitter, tragically--or maliciously?--was blocking Trump's tweets. That censorship the anti-Trumpers wanted was working against them. One of Trump's fans or followers would try to get the word to others, but Twitter prevented people seeing Trump's calls for order.
Dinesh D'Souza was able to get a live video of Trump's "go home" speech on Twitter--but Twitter blocked it and flagged it as a "claim about election fraud"! Robot censorship kept the people waiting for Trump to tell them to go home from knowing when he did. Twitter could be blamed for any criminal acts that took place after about 4 p.m.; their misguided effort to keep everyone "safe from misinformation" contributed to a situation of real danger.
At this point the whole campaign to replace American Democracy with self-defeating socialism is starting to resemble a piece of really bad fiction that no editor thought credible enough to publish. We have a nation of allegedly educated adults, going into a panic over a chest cold that doesn't even make most infected people cough--because the number of people whose colds turn into pneumonia is higher than it's ever been before, because American Democracy has worked well enough that more people are alive than were ever alive at the same time before. We have these panic-stricken people frantically voting themselves more handouts from the public treasury, even though they all know that the national government is already in debt and needs to be slashing services and concentrating on eliminating that debt. We have them voting for a set of ideas that they all know have failed every other nation that's ever tried them. We have an allegedly intelligent President and a large number of allegedly competent voters refusing to accept that the more grossly misguided of two misguided parties won an election. We have allegedly intelligent adults allowing this denial to be used to discredit the majority party. It's hard to imagine what can come out of this situation because, if one had made such a situation up as fiction, one would have discarded the whole idea on the grounds that things like that don't happen.,
The mind-boggling stupidity of this situation tempts many of the people whose wisdom I respect to fall back on ideas like "Surely the Second Coming is at hand." It may be but a lot of people have thought it was, and merely discredited themselves by believing it was, in the past. If the Second Coming is at hand I believe God wants Christians to do our best to lead our country out of the mess it is in. And we don't know how. It's not rational for a nation to get into such a mess.
I don't know what should be done, or whether anything can be done, either. What the Bible and history tell me is that nations get the leaders they deserve. Maybe we as a nation deserve the misery of socialism. As a nation we clearly aren't wiser or better than Cuba or Venezuela.
I believe that, if anything can be done to keep the United States from turning into a bigger version of Venezuela, it will be the kind of thing this web site has been urging on "conservative" Americans for all these years this web site has existed. We need to stop pretending that takers are as valuable to society as makers. We need to stop pretending that taking is as sustainable as making. We can't expect power-lusting socialists to do this for us. We are going to have to take personal responsibility for doing it ourselves, if it can be done at all. I'm not sure that anything can be done. I'm tempted to emulate some of my elders and wring my hands and wail, "The Bible says that 'in the last days' there will be wars and plagues and famines..."
It does and there will, but so long as reality is not handing us the message that we're ninety years old and therefore meant to lie down, apologizing to the young, and die, I believe we're responsible for doing what we can to prevent those wars, plagues, and famines in our time.
So let's try this: Stop hating and blaming either of the two poor, old, sick men who were set up as presidential candidates last year. The one who's made the bigger fool of himself deserves to be recognized as senile. The other one needs loyal and parliamentary opposition. I believe the best opposition to the bad policies Poor Old Joe Biden represents will consist of recognizing that disadvantaged citizens need opportunities to work and be good citizens rather than handouts to support their being bad citizens. It's true, as someone tweeted yesterday, that if you give a homeless person a $10 meal and a $50 motel room, all of that $60 is going to its goal of meeting the homeless person's immediate survival needs, whereas if you give $60 to the federal government, it's really optimistic to believe even $10 will reach the homeless person. What's more, if you pay someone who is not (yet) homeless $60 for a one-day odd job, all of that $60 is going to the goal of keeping that person productive and respectable, meeting per house payments and educating per children, and you also show respect and good faith toward the person.
People who have lost income due to the coronavirus panic would really rather have jobs, if only odd jobs, than become welfare cases. Reducing taxes and spending on welfare is actually how we show compassion toward those who have less. How's that for a radical change? Poor people would rather have fewer barriers to self-employment than have an inadequate handout check and the emotional burden that comes with it. Rather than hating leftists as people ("being hated, don't give way to hating") we could simply recognize, and demonstrate, that there's a better way to meet their stated goals. This growth in understanding would come eighty years too late for some people. Better late than never.
