Outcry is not enough

Opinion by  John Hopkins
Floyd County Democratic Pary chair

Americans are right to protest when police abuse their power and take someone’s life in the process.

We are right to protest when obvious crimes are ignored. We are right to protest when our nation’s wealth is employed by law to diminish the weak and the voiceless.

We are right to protest when protest itself is treated as though it were unlawful.

Protest may wake the sleeping conscience, may rally the sympathetic bystander – and yet, protest taken to extreme will never carry the day. When the justified shout of “This is wrong” is lost in the smoke and rubble borne of reckless anger, society will rouse itself to save what property it can.

Humans are an acquisitive species. We naturally gather to ourselves and to our kin, and only with time learn to share, to consider the needs of those outside our closest ties.

Protection of property was expressed in civilization’s earliest laws. It took centuries until thinkers widely began to say that humans had a right not only to own bread and bed but also to shape the conditions of their own lives, even to choose where they worked and who to salute and obey.

The mayors and governors of our 50 states understand this and need no incoherent threats of mobilized armies to bring order to the cities where old pain and new anger exploded into destruction. The White House theatrical production on Monday, with the photo op outside historic St. Johns Church and Fort Bragg Military Police deployed into Washington, was not about restoring order. It was a frantic attempt to assert that the President was in control.

The danger of this moment, the greater danger beyond that of fire and broken windows, is that in playing to his base with his strongman act and appeal to the Insurrection Act of 1807, this President who could not condemn injustice, nor grieve with those who mourn, has sent a signal yet more ominous than his threats to cut off Michigan’s and Nevada’s federal funds for mailing out absentee ballots.

There is much to be improved in some of our country’s police departments, but Kent State showed how ill-suited military forces are to the job of keeping civil order. It is we the people, and the men and women sworn to defend and protect in our 19,000 towns and cities, who we trust to do that job.

We must say it often, from now to November: Protest is our right, yet never sufficient until we follow through at the ballot box.