cmakaioz
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2012
- Messages
- 1,582
- Reaction score
- 451
- Location
- Oakland, CA
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Other
There's a sizable chunk of folks who have fetishized political demonstration to the point of no longer worrying about tactical sense. They go out and stir things up for many reasons -- to feel the rush of actually DOING something instead of being purely reactive in politics, to score points on an invisible glory scoreboard, to flip a symbolic (or occasionally literal) middle finger to the career bigots (like Santorum) systematically dehumanizing them, etc.
But at the end of the day, there are also folks who go out and do things like this because they literally don't see that there's anything else for them to try, and they feel they have to do SOMETHING.
Genuinely revolutionary action is extremely risky, and you take most or all of the risk BEFORE finding out if it can or will be successful.
Symbolic demonstration (here, at least) involves a whole lot less risk, has become (mostly) socially condoned, and still gives the feeling (illusion?) of having done something...enough at least to assuage feelings of guilt about political passivity.
Those forms of action and criticism which have a much better chance of achieving something are of course far more uncomfortable, inconvenient, or even lethally risky, and so accordingly a much smaller proportion of dissidents engage in them.
