Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When did protesting become an all-purpose Get Out Of Jail Free card?

 Black Lives Matter want to protest police brutality, so they walk down the middle of the freeway.  That costs the taxpayers money paying cops overtime to guard the protestors and paying highway crews overtime to clean up after them, money which is NOT going to repairing our failing infrastructure of roads and bridges.  The cost per protester might easily be thousands of dollars.  

 If I wanted to film the chase scene for a movie set on that same stretch of freeway, I’d have to get a permit, film at non-rush hour, pay the cops and pay for clean-up. Why should those services be free for protesters?

 Add in the societal cost of blocking I-35 during rush hour last year, or blocking I-94 on 4^th of July Weekend, the thousands of hours lost by people who couldn’t get home, the tons of additional pollutants discharged by idling engines, the emotional damage to families caused by “Are we there yet” and “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” making this the Worst Vacation Ever . . . the protesters have much to answer for.

 Arrest them, charge them with a crime, sentence them to time served and a one-dollar fine PLUS restitution.  Let’s see how serious they are when the real cost of their anti-social activities are laid at their feet.

 Joe Doakes

The whole point of “civil disobedience” is accepting the consequences of doing something illegal and confrontational, to highlight the injustice – especially if it’s really, really unjust.

Water cannon blasting black school children?  Highlighted injustice pretty starkly.

People blocking interstates, keeping other people from getting to/from work with no consequence to themselves?  Not so much.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, July 15th, 2016 at 5:30 am and is filed under Urban Progressive Privilege. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.