Though Experiment: What will it take for the US to erupt in street-filling protest/riots

[Duke Newcombe]

I've been watching the students in London protesting about the tripling of tuition at University. I've seen mass worker strikes, and the way people mobilized in France regarding the increase in the retirement age.

What actions/situations would have to come to pass here in the States to cause the common Joe/Jane Sixpack would literally be in the streets, tearing crap up, blocking streets in front of corporate headquarters or government agencies? I don't mean the Tea Loon Party kinds of "we wanna take ur kuntry back" kind of protest. I mean full-on MASS direct action.

When I say Joe and Jane, I mean folks who are normal workaday folks, somewhat comfortable, lower to middle class, who never even protested a hike in milk prices.

[Posteritatis]

1. A cancelled federal election *might* do it; can't think of much else. (nt)

[Fozzledick]

12. Didn't do it in 2000

[Posteritatis]

42. Nowhere near what I'm talking about

I'm talking "there will be no election today, there are no polls," not that debacle which, while it sucked, at least went through the appearance of the proper motions and was recognized by about half the country as legitimate. I'm talking no election at all, like what Ridge briefly proposed in 2004.

[Billy Burnett]

43. Canceling football, baseball, basketball and Nascar would do it.

USians place the highest value on sport.
Many know the minutia of their fav sport - injury reports, personal stats, free agent values, 3rd down dropped balls in the 2nd quarter of an 80's game, even multiple fantasy team leagues and trades from years ago.

Ask them how a bill becomes the law of the land they live under? Nada.

[Hannah Bell]

2. less frog-boiling, more fly-killing

[Poll_Blind]

3. I don't know what but I do know that Americans are as likely to trash their own cities in a riot....

...than go after corporations with that energy. I'm not even sure what percentage of Americans even understand the purpose of protest. I think they know riot much better.

PB

[griffi94]

4. lack of cable TV

let the television go off and it'll hit the fan.
besides that...probably nothing.

[Scurrilous]

6. Yep.

That's about it.

[Lorien]

19. Bingo!.nt

[Greyhound]

5. Yep, turn off the God-Box. n/t

[neverforget]

7. If it happened, would it be reported?

[Jim Sagle]

8. I dunno, but I think the oligarchs want it to happen.

It may be paranoia, but I sense that our elites are getting impatient with our lack of resistance. Our inert response to Gore vs Bush, the 9-11 con, the TARP robbery, and the numerous Obama double crosses may have them wondering just how much pushing and shoving around we’ll take before violence explodes and gives them a pretext for a final crackdown.

[krispos42]

9. A really bad call by the refs in the closing moments of a really close football game

White cops beating a non-white guy to death on live TV?

[mikeburetta]

10. what will it take?

If we remember our own labor history the powers that be can only push so far till there is a reaction. Remember this country-the usa was the birth place of the wobblies and what may day was all about.

[Roma]

11. A reinstated military draft

That's really what got us out in the 60's. I wish I could say it was some idealistic anti-war sentiment, but for most it was the inconvenient possibility of conscription.

Having skin in the game is a powerful motivator.

[theHandpuppet]

27. I think you nailed it

The draft might be the only thing I could envision prompting people to tke to the streets.

[Shanti Mama]

28. Yup, the draft or drastic reduction in LONG established benies. nt

[lob1]

13. I think it could happen if they cut or

privatize Social Security.

[hfojvt]

14. easy

The Detroit Lions win the Superbowl.

Not sure how to do it outside of Michigan though.

[Ex Lurker]

15. Joe and Jane six pack almost NEVER riot, no matter how bad it gets

if they do, things are so far gone that regime change is not far behind--think France, 1790, Russia, 1917 or Romania 1989. A better question might be what would it take to get teens and twentysomethings out in the streets in large numbers--and not to commit mindless mayhem, but organized (at least somewhat) and with a purpose. I haven't a clue what that might be. As someone else said, maybe bringing back the draft. Or the sense that their economic prospects are so grim they have nothing to look forward to.

[Raine]

16. Being 20 or 30 years younger

is what it would take for me. I'm not physically up to that kind of thing anymore. :-(

[dkf]

17. Win the world series or the national Championship or the Super Bowl?

[Ozymanithrax]

18. Much higher level of discomfort. n/t

[jimlup]

20. Actually the protests in California over the UC system cuts were quite extreme last year

I think we have to see the obvious as well. The naively stupid Tea Party is the American version. As Chomsky explains: these people have legitimate grievances and they're legitimate anger is not being channel by the left but instead the right.

[Jamastiene]

21. Americans won't do it. Period.

If the election theft of 2000 didn't do it, nothing will.

Just think about it. Our election was totally subverted. It was a total coup d'etat and no one took to the streets.

Our own party stopped any thoughts anyone would have had to fight back then by telling us to follow whatever BS the SCOTUS handed down...and BS they did hand down.

Here we are 10 years later, lots of hideous stuff has happened, INCLUDING the Patriot Act, and no one has taken to the streets.

It is simply not going to happen. Americans are like extremely overprotected children who have had the cage doors flung open all of a sudden...we won't step out of the cage. We didn't step out of the cage in 2000 when our elected president was told to go back to Tennessee. We didn't step out of our cage when the Patriot Act was passed. We didn't step out of our cage when the Patriot Act was renewed.

We just won't.

Why would we?

We are too afraid chaos would descend on the country and we wouldn't have our cherished freedoms any more... you know, the freedoms we already don't have any more but think we still have because the government told us to think that?

[ipaint]

22. Strip the middle class of their wealth. All of it. nt

[nc4bo]

31. Yes. ALL of it from the least to the mightiest then all we will have is each other.

on the same patheticly desperate playing field.

We're just too selfish and willfully unaware that what happens to the poorest amongst us will eventually happen to the richest.

Sad but true, more often than not.

[ipaint]

23. dupe. nt

[AndyTiedye]

24. "Taking to the Streets" is a City Thing

The Mighty Slime Machine will always channel the anger against some relatively helpless minority group.

Even if that somehow didn't happen, "taking to the streets" only makes sense in the center a somewhat densely-populated city.
Most of us don't live in such places.

Many modern "communities" don't really have a center, and often have very little public space at all.

The MSM under-reports or completely fails to report protests (unless they are of the teabag variety),
so if the people can't see us protest, then for all practical purposes it didn't happen.

[dreamnightwind]

25. Social security! eom

[ixion]

26. A break in the food supply chain is always a safe bet

Revolutions begin when people are hungry.

[Strelnikov_]

29. When the 'No Gas' signs go up at the go-juice dispensaries n/t

[WinkyDink]

30. Nothing. We are a cowed citizenry.

[cigsandcoffee]

32. Ending the mortgage tax credit. n/t

[n2doc]

33. Raising Taxes on the rich

Because Faux, Rush and the T bs'ers would rile them up to protest en masse.

And like good trained sheep they would do it.

[eShirl]

34. the threat of making the rich pay their fair share of taxes

[old mark]

35. Will never happen. People here are too stupid, lazy and interested in their own comfort

to actually take to the streets...The right wingers are much more likely than anyone on the left. The only thing that brought out so many in the 60's and early 70's was the draft of students and middle class kids into the Vietnam war. When the draft ended, it all stopped almost overnight, and you will notice ther are NO large protests against out totally fake wars even after 10 years of killing for no reason.

Americans don't care about anyone but themselves and will not revolt because it is not convenient.

mark

[Skidmore]

36. Turning off electricity and destroying the battery supply of the nation.

[jberryhill]

37. Are you kidding?

I really wonder what kind of bubble some folks live in.

In this country, you could get more people into the streets to ELIMINATE social programs altogether, than to protest against cuts.

[Mnemosyne]

38. Having to feed their children from the garbage cans of the wealthy, maybe.

[Ezlivin]

39. Never. The people didn't riot against Hitler...

But Then It Was Too Late

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43' had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33'. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

...

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was 'defeatism.' You assumed that there were lists of those who would be 'dealt with' later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a "victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that their 'treasonable attitude' had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

"Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution' of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

From the book "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer.

[Duke Newcombe]

40. Damn. Very powerful.

Bookmarked.

[Poboy]

45. good post/excerpt. -nt

[jpljr77]

41. I think if the tax cuts are extended for all, but the mortgage interest deduction is cut...

that would be the official start of it.

[XemaSab]

44. 20% unemployment

But the real question, as implied upthread, is whether it will be a fascist protest or a socialist protest.

I know which way my money is leaning. :(

Well, metaphorical money, 'cause I'm unemployed. :( :(

I think that the one thing that could unite the right and the left is RAGE about outsourcing.

[JackRiddler]

46. When Hollywood decides to film the revolution.

Well, it will look like it happened.

A military draft would do it.