I attended the Black Lives Matter “rally”/demonstration in Saint Paul yesterday.
Or the end of it, anyway; the protesters blocked the Green Line and all traffic on University at Lexigton starting at 9:30 AM, and I got there around 11:30 – in plenty of time for the die-in, a bunch of speeches, and all sorts of chanting.
Uni at Lexington, looking northwest to southeast through spilled coffee. Or maybe a dab of salsa. Or hash brown grease. Not sure. You can sorta make out a cop car on the left; beyond it, the Lexington Avenue Green Line station. The actual protest is out there. Honest.
The bad news? I brought my camera; I also apperently dripped some coffee on the lens, which coagulated in place, leaving me with really bad photos:
Looking across Uni, cops on the left, protesters behind the crud.
My photos aren’t clear. I get it.
But they were about as clear as the rationale for the protest.
The stated reason for the protest was to mess with people using the Green Line to get to the Vikings home opener.
But – and let’s leave aside for a moment that Metro Transit routed buses around the stoppage during the entire course of the protest, and had additional buses standing by to carry passengers past the protest – there’s the little matter that…
…no more than a dozen Vikings fans actually park east of Lexington and take the train to downtown Minneapolis.
Speaking of numbers, I counted the following when I was there:
- Perhaps 75 protesters, including speakers.
- Of them, 15-18 were African-American. 50-60 were white.
- There were 14 police squad cars – one state patrol, one Transit cop, the rest Saint Paul. They blocked University and Lexington a block away on all sides of the protest.
- There were also four mounted cops and six cops on bike.
The police didn’t outnumber the protesters – but the protesters outnumbered the cops by maybe two or three to one.
So why “protest the NFL” in a place where the NFL and the Vikings will be the absolute last people to notice it? Why didn’t they hold the protest on the Washington Avenue bridge, blocking the many, many people who take the train up from the Mall of America area from getting to the game, and actually getting the NFL’s attention?
Because – this is my theory, here – the Saint Paul wing of BLM isn’t about protesting power structures. It’s about 2016, and trying to keep African-Americans fired up to vote in a year where the Democrat party’s entire slate is geriatric white people.
When is the Gun Rights Matter protest scheduled? Have you got the permits?
One suggestion: you should coordinate with the Black Lives Matter folks and the Undertakers Union so when they stage their next “die-in,” we all can be there to get on the news. Won’t President Obama be pissed he missed it?
They certainly aren’t changing anyones minds. So your theory does make sense. I also think that Mr Straight Outta Hamline is lining himself up for a lifetime of paid agitator/victim. There is good money and minimal work involved if you can get into that racket.
built into the organizational DNA of the left is the need to compartmentalise their power bases into homogeneous operational silos with only the “community organizers” from each silo talking to each other. They think the reason Occupy Wallstreet failed is because it had a heterogeneous horizontal organizational structure. BLM is just Occupy Wallstreet 2.0.
Why didn’t they hold the protest on the Washington Avenue bridge, blocking the many, many people who take the train up from the Mall of America area from getting to the game, and actually getting the NFL’s attention?
Really? You wonder why they didn’t want to bother a bunch of blue collar folks who’d already done their “tailgating” before they got on the train and were intent on getting to use the tickets they just bought for $100?
If BLM had have held the protest there and seriously interrupted those guys there would have been ambulances for BLM’s members, not a police escort.
I think the protest happened there because that is the location of the incident where the boy with autism needed hospitalization after his encounter with Metro Transit police. http://www.startribune.com/more-details-on-metro-transit-police-incident-involving-autistic-teen-in-st-paul/324119331/ Looking at the report, this was one case where I would agree with BLM that there was probably some unnecessary use of force. I know people who’ve had similar encounters with Metro Transit who were simply told that being on the tracks was trespassing and if they didn’t get off tracks, they’d be arrested. No one was asked to give IDs even though they didn’t initially get off tracks- they argued some with the transit police before leaving.
I do agree, though, that the protest would be far more effective if it actually had a clear message. Since they don’t seem to want to have a clear message, Mitch is probably correct that it is just another machine to drum up the votes, tiptoeing around the fact that the very people they are drumming up the votes for are the people who really don’t want to make any changes to the system.