I hate to be a pretentious cunt trying to predict anything about the future, but I want to take us all back to 1968. MLK is making progress for Civil Rights. Hell, the CRA changed the landscape of America, for better or worse. For all his personal faults, for all the speech ghostwriting and all, I think he truly believed that true equality was coming. That his kids and other peoples kids would be judged by the content of their character. And we may have been on the cusp of that.
Then he got shot. And everything that he dreamed for the future hinged on one thing: the reaction to him dying. If it was peaceful, his dream would live on. But the 1968 riots were the death knell to it all. And the results were disastrous.
Baltimore and Detroit would suffer so bad that both of them would be basket cases that still haven't really recovered. Chicago is a bullet riddled hellhole that gentrification isn't fixing. Kansas City was in Kansas so honestly who cares. But it was the worst civil disturbance since the Civil War, and I think it set us back a good 20-40 years in progress. My grandmother told me that she and many of her friends were all for the movement, but when the riots happened, any sympathy died out. The 80's and 90's only exacerbated the problems in the communities as urban centers rapidly collapsed and people began to flee the burned out shells in the aftermath.
The point is, riots don't help anything. It only confirms prejudices that people have. It only makes people angrier, damages towns and communities, and only helps a media that increasingly tries to make money off of rage to stop their inevitable demise. And then when people get scared, more cops and laws start arriving. Think this prick, whose guilty as fuck and absolutely killed that man, is a bad cop? Well there's only gonna be more of them when they start taking anyone who applies and tells them to enforce at least a thousand ordinances and can basically do anything they want.
Both sides are wrong in this, and the results will be disastrous.
