we’ll meet resistance with resistance<\/a>” to Saturday morning’s “de-escalation training”, and partly due to the heavy presence by the Saint Paul Police, who blocked off most of Snelling Avenue for a fair chunk of the day.<\/p>\nThe police also directly intervened in a few incidents where “counterprotesters” – I think that exaggerates their numbers and role, but whatever – heckled the march, moving to screen the “counterprotesters” off from the march in what was likely a prudent effort, but wasn’t one of the First Amendment’s shining hours on either side.<\/p>\n
But enough pleasantries; I have a question for you.<\/p>\n
If I wanted to have a Tea Party march from Hamline Park up Snelling Avenue, completely blocking traffic during one of the busiest money-making days of the year for Midway merchants – say, next Saturday, also during the State Fair – could I expect the same level of accomodation and forebearance from the City that BLM got? \u00a0 While, like BLM, not bothering to get a city permit to use a street and block traffic?<\/p>\n
I mean, forget for a moment that 2\/3 of the people in my parade likely won’t be the white liberals and union people that made up 2\/3 of the BLM march, and also keep your bosses, Mayor Coleman and his city council, in office.<\/p>\n
What would your response be?<\/p>\n
That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To: \u00a0City of Saint Paul From: \u00a0Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant Re: \u00a0Protests Dear City, I caught part of the Black Lives Matter protest over the weekend. \u00a0Everything turned out OK – partly due to BLM’s leadership’s abrupt change in tone, from “we’ll meet resistance with resistance” to Saturday morning’s “de-escalation training”, and partly due to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[249],"class_list":["post-54968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54969,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54968\/revisions\/54969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}