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In reply to the discussion: #BlackLivesMatter activists want the women who interrupted Bernie Sanders to publicly apologize [View all]daredtowork
(3,732 posts)This is a copy of a comment I made in another thread, but I think it's more pertinent here.
Today I was reading a book on the Free Speech Movement and the New Left of the 1960s. I was amazed at how much that period had in common with today: a feeling that elites were taking away people's rights, that there was an oligarchy hovering over both major political parties, that - this is the kicker - housing prices were out of control!
One interesting element of the Free Speech Movement was that it was led by a United Front of Left, Right, and Radical students = they managed to come together around the issue they wanted to pursue. They took their cue from another coalition group called Slate: while this group was on the Left, it's party-politics stopped there. Slate united a whole spectrum of the Left from mild Liberals to flaming Radicals around very specific goals. According to the book I'm reading, the upshot of this was to shift the goals from the margins and give them a broader political base. This book also explains how this process made the F word part of common teenage vocabulary today (you could and did get arrested for displaying it in 1964).
The Free Speech Movement started in part as a struggle for students to advocate for the Civil Rights Movement on campus, and in turn they absorbed many of its strategies and tactics. As I read the decision of the students to proceed with a Sit-in while a low-level bureaucrat argued vigorously with the reasons their tactics were ineffective (a Professor I had studied under, btw - I had no idea he had ever been an administrator, much less so prominently involved!), all I could do was chuckle to myself over the "diversity of tactics." Many students joined in the actions because they felt that normal procedures simply didn't get things done anymore.
Does any of this sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same! The Millennial generation is rerunning this in the form of Black Lives Matter! Most people are reaching out to MLK for comparisons, but I think the real comparison is the Free Speech Movement for the youth element, the disregard of ideology, and the "diversity of tactics" applied to reach their goal.
Reading this book also underscored for me that Black Lives Matter is solely focused on their goals and not on any larger outcome like whether getting a Democrat elected will ultimately help achieve goals down the road. They have goals NOW, and they take actions NOW to achieve those goals NOW. Until we come to terms with that, I believe we will continue to be frustrated by the actions of Black Lives Matter activists.