Even If You Disagree With Rioters, There’s Something Worth Thinking About
Why you should pay attention, even if you think there’s nothing valid there
If you’re like me, the death of George Floyd was a head-shaking event. It was a sad but predictable inevitability. But this essay isn’t about George Floyd or police misuse of force. What I didn’t predict (and if you’re like me, what you didn’t predict) was the ensuing madness, including the establishment of the CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle and ongoing nightly riots in Portland. This is new, at least as far as I can tell. We’ve had riots before. They’re also fairly predictable, and my response to them is usually the same. Riots do not help anything. Riots also make me shake my head.
Certainly, COVID-19 is causing this time to be different. The confusion about what to do, the inability to work, to get together with friends, to visit loved ones, to be unable to operate as members of our communities, this definitely exacerbated the unrest this time around. But this essay isn’t about COVID-19, either. This essay is about the people doing the rioting, but it’s to the people like me who just shake their heads at people like them. It’s about rioters, and it’s to head-shakers.
Who are they?
No, I don’t mean black people. Black people are not all the same, and there are plenty of them shaking their heads, too. I’m talking to the black head-shakers just as much as the rest of the head-shakers. I think there are quite a few bad actors involved in these riots. Some instigate. Some just want to rebel. Some want to destroy and tear things down, from windows and statues to police departments and Western civilization. Others want to support a righteous cause. I’m not talking about any of them. The people that I want to draw the attention of the head-shakers to here are the people who actually feel that we aren’t looking out for them or that the system is rigged against them. They want a fair shot at the American dream, and they are Americans, but don’t see a fair shot. The people who have a fairer shot, who are participating on behalf of others are not who I’m talking about here. I’m talking about those who feel they are the effected ones. Many of them are peacefully protesting, and they’re included, but I’m mostly talking about the growing numbers who are being increasingly violent. I’m talking about them.
No excuses
This isn’t going to be me making excuses for bad behavior or failure. I believe that America is the best system of governance that humans have come up with so far. I routinely learn something new about how this country was designed and marvel at the foresight of the Founding Fathers. I believe in hard work, and that if there’s blame to be assigned it’s best to assign it to oneself, because that’s the most useful perspective. Individual responsibility is if not my number one ethic than certainly top five.
If you believe that everyone has a fair shot, I understand, and I mostly agree. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and that’s how it looks a lot of the time to a lot of us. And no, by us I don’t mean white people. If you’re looking for the racial angle in this essay, stop. It’s not about race. I believe the U.S. has the best system ever created for anyone to achieve in the history of humanity. But it’s not perfect, and we know it’s not perfect.
There are things that make it harder for some than it is for others, and that’s OK. It’s not possible to give everyone an equal shot, and any attempt to do so would be horribly destructive. What everyone deserves is a fair shot, as fair as we can make it. We can make it fairer, but anyone who tells you that they know how and they can tell in you in three minutes or a thousand words is delusional or lying. It’s extremely complex. I don’t have the answers to this problem, but that’s not the point of this essay.
What’s the point?
If you think that racism isn’t an issue, OK. If you think that it’s not a lack of money or education, OK. If you think there’s no problem with the rich being as rich as they are and the poor being as poor as they are, OK. But here’s what struck me about these riots, and if you’re like me it should strike you, too: something has got to be wrong for this many people to feel this strongly. Again, I’m not saying they’re going about it the right way or that they’re feelings are justified, and I’m not even saying that they’re right. Even if you’re a 100% head-shaker there’s still this: in order to mobilize so many people, even unwittingly, to such extremes there has to be that many people who are willing to go to those extremes. It doesn’t matter if they’re doing it for real reasons or if their reasons have been co-opted by the bad actors. The saying is, “apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.” I don’t think it’s apt here because I don’t think it’s the apathetic (some head-shakers, some not) that the evil has taken hold of. It’s those that I’m talking about that the evil has mobilized. If they weren’t so unhappy, these bad actors wouldn’t be able to hijack them this way.
What society couldn’t be improved by listening to those that are this dissatisfied? The reason doesn’t matter. If there are this many people this upset, something is surely at least somewhat improvable. It may not be at all what they say it is, but if we head-shakers aren’t willing to believe what they say (though I strongly advise listening), then we must at least seek other reasons for so much unrest and try to understand them and improve the situation. No free state can survive with an unsatisfied portion of its population that is growing in both size and urgency.
