To: Jason Chavez, Minneapolis DSA/DFL councilbeing
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Punching

Councilbeing Chavez,

You tweeted this on Wednesday:

During the uprising in 2020, the Coliseum Building was badly damaged along with many small businesses on the Lake Street corridor.

Today, on Juneteenth we get to celebrate some positive news for our community. The Grand Opening celebration of the Historic Coliseum Building. 1/ pic.twitter.com/PPaHQGFeFl

— Jason Chavez – Minneapolis Ward 9 (@MplsWard9) June 19, 2024

Let’s talk about the term “uprising”.

It usually connotes a group of subjugated, beaten-down people, “rising up” against their oppressors.

Good examples of uprisings that fit some variant of that definition:

• The Boston Tea Party – indigenous people rose up against colonialism
• The Sobibor Uprising – people escaped from colonizers who had started the job Hamas is trying to finish.
• The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – actual genocide victims attacked actual practitioners of genocide.
• The Storming of the Bastille – Musical theatre fans attack critics

Each of these uprisings have a few things in common: the people doing the uprising were being actively oppressed by those up against whom they rose; the targets of their attacks were the actual oppressors; tax authorities, the SS, the monarchy.

In May of 2020, people who considered themselves oppressed (we’ll accept that for sake of argument) “rose up” and destroyed…

…hundreds of businesses, extremely disproportionately owned by immigrants, people of color, people in the neighborhood. Oh, the Third Precinct got destroyed – after a couple of days of generalized looting and arson, seemingly almost as an afterthought, to give the “uprising” some window-dressing sense of political virtue other than “looting and burning cafes owned by first-generation Americans”.

I may be just an obstreporous peasant, but I think “downrising” might be a better term.

That is all.