One of the things Your Humble Blogger has been dwelling on is why America doesn\u2019t just find a way to live with the occasional riot.\r\n
That sounds terrible, doesn\u2019t it? Riots aren\u2019t good. I hate them, and I never want to be anywhere near one again.\r\n
But there are lots of things I hate and don\u2019t want to be near, and as a nation we live with a lot of them. Floods, fires, earthquakes. Pig farms. Sewage treatment plants. Industrial waste. Nuclear waste. Global warning. Police brutality. We do some stuff to make these things easier to live with, sure. We commit some resources to ameliorating them and then we live with the rest of the problems.\r\n
I mean. For fuck\u2019s sake, we were finding a way to live with the pandemic, as bizarre as the phrase living with the pandemic<\/i> sounds. As a nation, as a culture, we pretty much looked at the notion of another hundred thousand deaths or more, many more people hospitalized and potentially given chronic conditions or long-term compromised health, and we looked at the resources it would take to eradicate it, and we largely said: what if we just learned to live with it?\r\n
Didn\u2019t we?\r\n
I\u2019m being facetious, in my heavy-handed way. I know why we can\u2019t live with riots. Or, rather, why we can\u2019t live with these<\/i> riots. After all, we live with sports riots. Looking at the amount of property damage, the expense of cleaning up afterward, that\u2019s not really different from the scale of living with Spring Break parties, big music festivals, even Hallowe\u2019en night. We could live with what happens during the riots. We can\u2019t live with who is rioting, and why.\r\n
Imagine this: if every time a police officer in the US killed an unarmed black person, there were a riot\u2014the precinct were set on fire, a dozen nearby buildings were vandalized, a bunch of windows smashed, some looting, a lot of yelling and chanting, a bunch of dumpster fires, and then everyone were to go home and sleep it off. If we knew it would happen, just like we know it happens after championships. A few minor injuries, probably, broken bones. Rarely, some more serious injuries, because you can\u2019t trust a fire. And yes, probably every few years someone would get killed, because a riot is, after all, an ugly thing.\r\n
It would be terrible. I would hate it. We could live with it.\r\n
What we can\u2019t live with, as a nation, is people of color protesting their violent oppression by the police\u2014or rather, by all of us using the police as a tool. That\u2019s why we feel the need to call out the National Guard and the 101st Airborne. Not because of the riots. Because of who is rioting, and why.\r\n
That's what we have to change about ourselves, I think.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger fails to go into the very interesting comparative study of riots in different nations and eras, but look, there's a point to be made.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20247,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20246\/revisions\/20247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}