On the Destruction of Property to Affect Change:
This is an old Rolling Stone article, but does seem apt for today's circumstances. Of course, there are way more than nine examples, but this should get people to think of the desperation when people do resort to violence:
1. The Boston Tea Party
Go figure: The 2010 libertarian-conservative insurgency claimed historical lineage from an act of property destruction. In 1773, British Parliament adopted the Tea Act, which encountered resistance across the Atlantic not, as is so often supposed, because it hiked taxes (it effectively lowered them), but because it imposed the supremacy of a capitalist monopoly, the East India Company, over the political rights claimed by colonists – as Englishmen. Some wildcat radicals left a Boston political meeting over the objections of a frustrated Samuel Adams, dressed up as Mohawk warriors (the better to preserve their anonymity – perhaps prefiguring a black bloc), and destroyed 342 chests of tea in Boston Harbor as an act of protest. Workers had produced that tea, capitalists had risked investment on it, and it was not the colonists' to destroy, but they said "fuck property rights" and did it anyway. Today's conservatives don't seem bothered by this inconvenient history, though, because think of the dress-up opportunities!
2. Smashing Columbus' Ship
In 1502, Christopher Columbus arrived in what is now Panamá to a people who were suspicious of his intentions, even though they didn't know about his ambitions for conquest, or his history of cutting off appendages of Arawak and Taino people in the drive for gold. When local Ngäbe leader el Quibian began to trade with and house Columbus and his brother Bartolomeo, he made the colonialists commit not to overstaying their welcome or go too far down the rivers. Eventually the Columbus brothers tried to trick and execute el Quibian, but he escaped, organized an alliance with his neighbors, and destroyed Bartolomeo Columbus' ship as it attempted to stray further down a river than was agreed upon. The ship didn't stand a chance, and neither did the Columbus brothers. Over 500 years later, the Ngäbe people are still free and largely autonomous, and still having to destroy the property of colonialists who try to steal their land. We recommend taking a shot of seco herrerano to el Quiban next Columbus Day.
3. Slave Uprisings
There is a longtime debate among historians about why Black subjects of chattel slavery in the U.S. had fewer major rebellions than their counterparts in the Caribbean and Brazil. Many major rebellions were prevented before they began, and others were suppressed too quickly, but much has been written on the other forms of class war waged by slaves, from work slowdowns, to escape, to the sabotage of the property of the planters. Samuel, a slave under prominent Natchez, Mississippi, politician John Quitman, broke an expensive new plow. Another slave injured some of Quitman's family by driving a carriage into an embankment on the way to a wedding. The number of these incidents are countless, and most went unrecorded, but the property was always fair game to those people who themselves were considered property.
4. The Molly Maguires
The word "sabotage" itself comes from an old form of property damage used for class struggle. If bosses tried to get one over on workers, the workers would respond by chucking a shoe (or sabot) into the machinery of production. This tradition was carried on by the Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania's coal mines in the 1870s, who had experience with class struggle against landlords back in the homeland. After emigrating across the Atlantic Ocean, they found that in order to demand safety in a very deadly workplace, fight wage theft, and gain basic labor rights, they had to create secret societies like the Molly Maguires to bomb train tracks and destroy coalmines. If they couldn't work in the mines safely, no one should be working in them.
5. Venus In Shreds
On March 10th, 1914, in response to the arrest of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst a day prior, Mary Richardson brought a meat cleaver into the National Gallery in London, and slashed up the shoulders, back, and neck of Venus, as painted by Diego Velazquez. Richardson later explained that she objected to "the way men visitors gaped" at the nude body, prone on a bed and admiring her reflection in a cherub-held mirror. "If there is an outcry against my deed," Richardson said, "let every one remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women." In the end, the painting was restored, Richardson's political leanings took a sharp right-hand turn, and British women obtained the right to vote.
6. Mandela's Guerrilla Force
After the passing of Nelson Mandela last year, there was an all-too-typical attempt to whitewash his past – but the Apartheid regime was not defeated by Western rockstars demanding Mandela's freedom alone. In the early 1960s, Mandela organized the Umkhonto we Sizwe (the MK) guerrillas alongside the South African Communist Party. The MK bombed the communications, transit and energy infrastructure that helped run the Apartheid economy. Mandela considered the sabotage a necessary method of escalation that would hopefully preempt the need for guerrilla warfare (which he and his associated did not take off the table). For this, Mandela was branded a terrorist by Western governments, which have in the intervening decades gotten no better at accurately applying that label.
7. The Plowshares Eight
Trespassing onto a Pennsylvania General Electric Nuclear Missile facility in September 1980, a group of eight pious Christians, among them priests and nuns, took hammers to the nose cones of two Mark 12A warheads and poured their own blood on the facility's papers in a call for peace. The Biblical injunction for such destruction can be found in the Book of Isaiah's prophesy that the people of many nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: national shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." The "Plowshares Eight" did prison time for their activism, but today remain unrepentant. Hallelujah.
8. Tear Down This Wall
The dismantling of the border dividing Berlin happened in phases. First, over the course of the fall of 1989, as sweeping border reforms precipitated a refugee crisis throughout the Soviet bloc, East Germans withdrew their political consent for the division of Germany, with rallies reaching the hundreds of thousands in East Berlin by early November, forcing the government to loosen the border. Owing to a botched announcement, people gathered in enormous numbers on the evening of Novermber 9th, overwhelming the border-enforcing soldiers. Having effectively destroyed the legal/social border, the East Germans took it upon themselves to physically destroy its concrete representation, showing up with renegade sledgehammers and, woodpecker-like, creating new crossing points, leading to more official action. It seems now that over half of East Germans miss communist party rule, but don't let that mitigate the badassery of literally smashing an oppressive border – a model Palestinians have tried to emulate with the land-grabbing separation wall that encloses the West Bank.
9. Frack The Police
Indigenous resistance in the Americas is not a story that ends centuries ago with the survivors of genocide left in poverty on reservations – it is still being written. The M'ikmaq people of the Elsipogtog First Nation took a stand against corporate resource extraction in 2013 when they spent months sabotaging efforts to start fracking near their land. When they blockaded the Southwestern Energy subsidiary's exploratory trucks, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police moved in with overwhelming force, pointing snipers at areas with small children and M'ikmaq elders. Someone in the community responded by setting five RCMP vehicles on the scene afire, and other police vehicles were damaged in later clashes. The fracking still hasn't begun, and at least one Canadian province has since banned fracking, proving that, once again, direct action gets the goods.
Read more: Rolling Stone
= new reply since forum marked as read
I will check it out when I get home. At work now!
Much appreciate it! 
Very informative.
And second - I was paying attention
- mostly because I have a dear old friend of 27 years who lives in Baltimore and was participating in the protests with her little girl. And you know - it makes me double down on putting the word 'riot' in an op in the AA Group. Sometimes the duck is a duck.
It was a riot on Monday afternoon. There were protests this past weekend (some 10K people peacefully trying to bring MUCH Needed change in their commuity). Protests will continue to happen (I hope so - now is the time to reload with words and civil disobedience - not retreat).
Me - I'm kind of happy we have slave revolts and the BTP. Out of the fire - sometimes really good things come. In the case of the slave revolts - I hope it's not years from now. I want the change . . . 20 years ago.
I've gotten much flack in bars and on here at DU.
I'm not saying I want the violence, or that it's even particularly needed in this case (I'm not there), or that there is never any instance where violence should be used, or that violence should be used in every instance! Nothing is absolute. There are varying shades even within the color gray!
I am saying that I understand that when people are pushed to a point where all other options have been exhausted, if they do resort to violence. Nothing wrong with trying to understand it.
I'm pro-peace, for instance, but I'm not a pacifist. If a situation gets to a point where I have to protect myself, my family, or even someone I don't know, I will use violence.
I must say, though, that I do lament innocent civilians and owners of community based stores. On a moral basis, it's repugnant to me; on a pragmatic basis, it's counter-productive. I would probably ask that if they need to destroy property, they direct that destruction to the forces of power - corporate buildings for example. I'm not advocating that, but if I felt the need to do something like that, it wouldn't be a mom & pop shop within my own community - again on both a moral and pragmatic basis.
I follow a philosophy where my actions are formulated by the context of events around me. And I leave all options open depending on the circumstance. I try to live by the standards of the peaceful anarchists, Leo Tolstoy and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the latter who shied away from revolution, and tended towards "build a new society within the shell of the old." However, I also understand that there may ever be a need to use violence such as espoused by Mikhail Bakunin, The Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine - the Black Army (fighting with the red army against the white army, and then fighting the red army when the latter betrayed the former) to affect a social change in the Soviet Union.
Of course, I'm only using historical examples to stress my point. For instance, it was the Haymarket Martyrs (anarchists), who were accused falsely of killing a police officer with a bomb. They were hanged merely for protesting the disgusting working conditions at the time. They brought about the 8 hour work day. They were a mixture of violent and peaceful anarchists, but both brought about a social change - that we may have a few hours in the day left to enjoy with our families, or pursue other interests. Having accomplished this, Adolf Fisher, one of the anarchists hanged, right before he was dropped, cried out, "Hoorah for anarchy! Today is the best day of my life!" - Wow, to be so passionate as to proclaim the best day of his life was his last!
Anyway, "be realistic; demand the impossible" in whatever fashion that is most apt!
Anyway, thank you for even attempting to understand my point of view, without putting words in my mouth as others have seen fit to do.
I wish you well! 
Check Strunk & White. Or, your own link, which says exactly what I'm saying.
http://grammarist.com/usage/affect-effect/
You aren't trying to change ("affect"
change, you're trying to bring about ("effect" change.
... It was I who was wrong.
I'll leave my replies up so the context is there for the correction.
Thanks for the clarification. 
Thanks to both you and Recursion for the clarification.
Any day you're alive and learning is a good day in my books
And am grateful for the clarification.
Now, I'd like to really get back to the actual thread topic.
And by the way:
You have access to the internet, as well.