LIVE COVERAGE: Local emergency declared in Charlottesville, Albemarle

[summer_in_TX]

14. Nope. I didn't say anything about sitting on our hands.

Effective protesting involves maintaining the moral high ground. But it does involve doing something, taking the confrontation forward.

Ghandi and Martin Luther King successfully channeled it.

It took courage, sacrifice, suffering, and a number died in the process. But they prevailed in the end, because they turned the majority of society and even former adversaries whose hearts and minds were in some cases changed.

Reichstag brought the full weight of the Nazis into power, when Hitler convinced the populace that militarization was justified by the violence that made them feel unsafe.

During the Vietnam War era, peaceful protests were sometimes infiltrated by those intent on discrediting the protests and the protesters. They passed out drugs and urged violence, and the left lost the next two elections. But we did not lose our basic form of government and we were able to recover.

It appears there's some of the same calculated agitation as part of the modus operandi occurring at some of the protests, but now it's happening while we have a fascist personality in the White House and a Republican party that is willing to accept very egregious actions just as long as they can hang onto power, unlike in the late '60s. We are much more at risk now than in the 1960's.