"Riots Are Complicated"

I said this on Facebook and it was taken somewhat poorly, as it's not a blanket condemnation of riots.

I won't condemn riots.

They aren't nice, they are polite, but they are periodically necessary, if you look at history. I mean, Spartacus? The hero of the movie Spartacus? The hero? He started out by leading a riot. Well, I mean, we call it a rebellion now, but it was a riot. What he did was illegal, and the people that he fought against were the duly and properly empowered structures of society, and he tried to stab them in the face.

One could argue that what he did was just, in the long arc of history. One could argue that it was right, in the end, but at the time? He was a rioter. He's one of the many revered and beloved rioters in history.

Of course, we are distant enough from the riot to distanced from the damage it caused and the lives that we lost, and we're definitely not the Roman Republic. I mean, senators don't even wear togas anymore, except in their frat boy stage.

Now, that doesn't mean that public violence in protest of authority is always and ever a good thing, but it does mean that I won't condemn all riots, particular ones that are y'know, ongoing. I'm pretty sure the Roman people weren't terribly pleased with the Third Servile War at the time.

Now some people have brought up looting as being the especially bad thing here but, y'know what? They divide into three basic groups:

1. Outside actors. We know that there have been a bunch of people not associated with Black Lives Matter or any other organization behind the protests who've been looting, vandalizing and otherwise rampaging, some of them with the specific intent of making the protests violent. They're gross and awful, and they need to be stopped. In a lot of cases, we're actually tracking them down and arresting them, like the racist yahoo who set fire to a courthouse in Nashville.

2. Opportunists. Yah, I know, I'm supposed to angry with them because it's unjust, but unless and until Jeff Bezos looses his purse-strings to pay his people a living wage, I remain unconfused as to who's stealing the most wealth and property.

3. Activists and protesters. It's been said repeatedly that "these people," the regular activists and protesters who succumb to the urge are "hurting their cause." I'm going to keep this as simple as I can: In a world where four men killed a man in broad daylight, and only one of them is currently under arrest, and only after massive public pressure, after unjust death after unjust death, after being told that they can't kneel during a song, they can't speak from a stage, they have to protest just so, behave just so, with no real change, how much more "hurt" do you think their cause can be?

Riots are complicated. We might not want them to be, but they are.

And, yes, violence doesn't solve anything - what it does do, is make new problems, and sometimes those problems have a clearer solution than what was there at first. Is that going to be the case this time? We don't know. We can't know, because we're in the middle of this thing. I hope I'll see you on the other side.