In Defense of Blocking the Highway
by Steve Alquist
"...Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: burning the American flag is a symbolic gesture that hurts no one and is completely protected speech under the first amendment. If a burning flag offends you more than the idea of the police gunning down a twelve year old carrying a BB gun or shooting a man in the toy aisle of a Walmart, your priorities are out of whack, and this piece isn’t written for you. This piece is for the rest of us.
Blocking the highway was dangerous. The protesters could have been hurt. They could have caused an accident, or delayed an ambulance bringing someone in need to the hospital. Yet accidents slow down the highways all the time. So does construction. So does a deer that’s lost its way. Somehow, ambulances make it through, take different routes, or go to different hospitals....
...The protesters are literally fighting for the lives of black and brown persons who are dying at the hands of an ever more militarized police. We have police officers getting away with murder. We are talking about centuries of racial oppression. Somehow, according to Paquin, blocking traffic for twenty minutes on a Tuesday night is “no better....”
http://www.rifuture.org/in-defense-of-blocking-the-highway.html
I also think the first comment response to this blog post makes an excellent point.
Excerpt of comment: "...I know that the seed issue of this article is the injustice that continues in policing and racial inequalities, and I’m totally on board with what you’re saying there. I’m going to push into my own pet issue of transportation, and I hope no disrespect will be taken to the important issue at the center of the Ferguson protests: it seems to me that if people care about delaying ambulances, they’ll support things like dedicated transit and bike lanes...When you hear white, middle class people kvetch about the delay that this or that protest created in their lives, they never seem to think about how systematically messed up our response to emergencies is based on their own day-to-day priorities. It’s a clear sign that their real problem is with the cause behind the protest rather than the tactic itself."
= new reply since forum marked as read
