No more business as usual," the organization leading the protest said on social media.
Dozens of Jewish protesters and their allies were arrested on Wednesday morning after they blocked rush hour traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway to demand a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.
A non-disruptive protest just gets ignored. You need to impact people’s daily lives to make them think why the problem arose in the first place.
People will find a way to get mad at any protest no matter how little it impacts others. See kneeling for anthems or just wearing shirts at events
But, you need to impact the lives of the people who have the means to make that change. A traffic jam isn’t going to do that.
I mean, is a major highway in the second largest city of the primary colonial sponsor a bad place? I guess if we had free teleportation they might find marginally better success in DC or Tel Aviv, but if you’re located in LA I can see why you’d choose to protest there and not somewhere else.
If it happened in a vacuum, probably not. But traffic jams don’t happen in a vacuum. They ripple out and cause effects that hit millions of other people. Such as this news article, this lemmy post, and all of the people here discussing it.
Traffic jam equals lots of news coverage lots of pissed off voters, lots of attention lots of eyes, that is how you get to people who can make a change.
“Fuck shit up for a many people as possible” isn’t sustainable. Gandhi and Martin Luther knew that. If it weren’t for the number of downvotes people are getting for even hinting that this isn’t the right way to do things, I would think this is actually a psyop from the other side to put people off towards Palestine.
Like just stop oil is actually run by oil companies to recruit the most extreme left people that think sitting in the road is doing anything more than pissing the average person off and giving right wing media material to hate you.
But nope, people really are this stupid. On both sides. Both want to divide so strongly, because if people actually got along we would start addressing issues instead of bitching online about what you hate about the other side.
You think Gandhi and Martin Luther King didn’t disrupt things? My god of course they did they were extremely disruptive. You’ve fallen for the whitewash history, were they teach you to be good little boys who sit down out of the way and don’t bother anyone. It’s fiction. It’s not real. Martin Luther King was disrupting a ton of stuff Gandhi even more so.
And a disruptive protest just makes people hate you and your cause.
I’m not really asking you to look it up or anything, but this gets parroted around a lot, and I wonder if there’s actually any data to really support it or if it’s just a statement that kinda sounds nice.
I mean maybe not data but it’s telling that almost every successful movement goes beyond the “quietly protest on the side of the road” step.
This post itself provides a new data point as a piece of evidence to support that claim. There is a news article written about it, and we are talking about it.