/r/50501 Mirror

Luigi got more done in a minute than all the thousands of protesters over the past 30 years.

Yep, pretty much sums up how I feel as an older millenial. The fact that Donald Trump has now won twice....I am just waiting on Merica to learn the hard way. I will be protesting as well. Its still better than nothing.

To my fellow millennials...

The protests are working. Even the weekend protests at tesla showrooms. Elon is freaking the fuck out, claiming that even talking (or pointing fingers) at cybertrucks is a crime. Why? Because the stock is toppling, and that stock is the foundation of his wealth. A lot of his other schemes depend on that stock being strong.

The protests against Republicans in Congress are working. Trump is pulling nominees for his administration because they are getting absolutely wrecked and those seats are flipping. These spineless fucks won't even show up to their own districts, let alone their own state because of the bad optics and disapproval from their constituents.

The rough part is, we have to keep this going for another few years. At least 2 IMHO. We need to flip Congress, impeach Trump and hold him and his lackeys accountable for their crimes. It's the only way we can move forward as a country. The alternative is literally violence in the streets as trump's SS (aka, ICE) continues to crackdown on legal and protected dissent.

The great resignation wasn’t about work at all.

We simply don’t believe in the future anymore, because it was taken from us by greedy assholes who were born 20 years before us. After your entire youth and early adulthood filled with struggle only to get your bosses boss a new ferrari you just don’t care anymore.

Now we’re all doomers hoping for this unjust bullshit to collapse and burn even if it takes us with it. After all how much can you loose if they already took it all?

I think there is hope. The movements you mentioned are all recent or were very short lived. Fourteen years elapsed between brown vs. board of education and the civil rights act of 1968. women’s suffrage in the us was a battle that raged from the declaration of independence to 1920, nearly 150 years. i think that we are seeing the first reversal of BLM progress. the me too movement definitely caused some change, but the fuckers are naturally fighting back. there will be more protests and more reversals before real change sticks. the arc of history bends slowly, but it bends. every time you protest, you help keep hope alive.

Peaceful protests stopped really accomplishing anything once the ones being protested learned that there's no long term consequence to just ignoring peaceful protests. Not only that protests in the past were far more strategic. You'd use Rosa Parks because she's got the marketable image when the cameras are out. You had sit-ins. You had well organized boycotts. You had people willing to sit in a county jail for being disruptive.

I went to a protest last month. What I heard reminded me of college. Spent like 40 minutes listening to the DJ talk about how music and activism have always gone hand in hand and how later in the day please stick around to listen to music of liberation. Art is commentary. It is rarely the driver of action. Listening to music isn't going to plan out a boycott and organize weekly/monthly meetings to plan out and continue motivating boycotts.

College campus students like to do silent protests on campus to people that agree with them and/or do symbolic stuff like lay on the ground and draw chalk marks around them or place duct tape on their mouths. Zero stakes, zero risk on a college campus, zero weight to these attempted symbols and of course the lack of organizing regular meetings to further operate. Protests have to evolve into professional/pseudo-professional organizations

And all the peaceful marches from MLK Jr. Elsewhere there was still Malcolm X, Black Panthers, Communist Party, Fred Hampton and his collection of people putting aside their racism and sexismm for shared labor/economic interests, and of course then there was MLK Jr being assassinated and a week of countrywide riots that sped the Civil Rights Act of 1968 through congress and the white house

The Tesla protests are good though. It needs to keep being hammered for years to come that Tesla cars are garbage and support garbage and portray an image of garbage. Continued exodus from X to BlueSky or Mastadon is good. Reddit to Lemmy is good. All things that hit rich people if enough people do make the move. If only there were good movements to get off Facebook and Instagram. Stuff like not buying Kentucky whisky/bourbon is good. Buy Canadian or overseas whiskey. Until American brands take a stand, buy foreign and make it known why you buy foreign

France protest good. Do like France do! Hope always.

Why does everyone not see anything in the Women’s March? It was a massively effective recruiting drive. Indivisible got a lot of members from the Women’s March. Indivisible has been extremely effective against Trump during his first term. They’ve been organizing for ten years.

This is why the majority of people buying and donating bus tickets for the April 5th protest are all women.

Protests are effective at establishing support for progressive reforms and at restraining governments from taking unpopular actions, even if the protesters don't achieve all their goals as quickly as they would like.

See: Why protest if it doesn't make a difference?

Protests do work

This is surprising, given that we constantly see examples where protest has made a difference. We have, already in 2024, seen blockades and protests by French farmers prompt the government to offer concessions. Likewise, in India, the renewed farmers movement marching towards Delhi has already prompted an offer from the government of improved prices for crops.

Mass street protests over a child sex abuse scandal in Budapest recently led Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to introduce legislation to address the scandal. Late last year, mass protests and street blockades in Panama led to the government closing one of the world’s largest copper mines.

Academic research also shows that protest can be influential. Workers’ protest and strike action was crucial in prompting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as part of the creation of the US welfare state. And disruptive protests have also slowed down the adoption of the austerity measures which have eroded welfare states across the high-income democracies for the past 40 years.

Colonialism was met with ongoing resistance and protest in almost every instance, including Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience, as well as more militant campaigns. This grew throughout the 20th century, until maintaining occupation ultimately proved unmanageable for the colonial powers.

BLM protests were actually very effective

Why do people keep saying the BLM protests didn't do anything?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_reforms_related_to_the_George_Floyd_protests

Did they completely solve the problem? No. But they had an impact.

Protesting works. You just have to keep doing it.

Millennials don’t believe protesting works.

For any given protest, what does the person attending believe it will do?

Astonishingly few protests in the modern world have led to immediate change regarding the issue they were held against, therefore anyone attending a protest with this in mind therefore will have violated expectations.

I have attended protests before and I see their goal as raising awareness of issues and giving a physical display of how many people are against a given subject. In this sense, as soon as a protest is seen it meets the goal.

So I ask again, if you say "protesting doesn't work", my question is, "How do you define work?"

Rugged individualism killed the Millennial activist. While social and political issues were impressed upon this generation from childhood, when the cards are down it's everyone for themselves. Individualism was the other value they we're raised with.

It's why in spite of holding enough electorate power they do not assert it. It's why millennials don't run for office or if they do they have zero solidarity among their own cohort.

I think a key difference lies in the way Baby Boomers were born in huge families with many siblings and first cousins. The parents cranked out half a dozen kids. They had to raise each other. They grew up in a period of collectivism.

Millennials were born to an age of the nuclear family in the era of mass production. It was a time of over abundance. It was Fukuyamas "end of history". The parents had one or two kids. They were treated like little princes and princesses destined to inherit humanity's final social and political form that is liberal democracy. That is faltering and Millennials have no idea what to do about it.

edit: I also want to add that a lot of millennials are comfortable enough to not have to care. This has been very unpopular to point out on reddit. While the middle class has been disappearing that doesn't mean everyone got pushed to the lower class. A lot of millennials made it to the upper half. There's no reason for them to be protesting.

it "doesn't work" because we're doing it wrong. we need to physically bar politicians from places they need to be with a 40 thousand strong human wall in their way, we need huge general strikes, we need to risk being shot by the national guard, we need to be massively disruptive and some of us have a really bad time of it - people had to die for the rights we have now, we didn't get them playing it safe and being afraid of and disclaimer-ing our sentences that we are "not advocationg violence or anything!" we got them by overwhelming the opposition till they either broke or had to flip to save face.

we're not going to make headway without some of us getting dissapeared or shot at.

Protesting only works if it’s violent, or threatening violence. If the powers that be aren’t scared they will not care.

I’m a millenial/Gen Z. I was really surprised to find out that I was one of the youngest in my protest group. A lot of people told me they were protesting for their grandkids. They also expressed regret that my generation would have to deal with the fallout of this.

Also, do we know that millennials are protesting less than other generations? My protests seem to be pretty age-diverse. They seem to match up with the generation percentages of the population at large. People might just be used to seeing mainly young people at protests.

collapsed inline media

My thing is I literally don't have the time. I'm primary income for my household, my kids eat up whatever sick time I have, and these protests, as far as I've seen, are never on the weekends. There's the 'economic blackout' ones I participated in, but it's not like those are making an impact to these companies that have hordes of resources to keep them afloat. Idk man. I don't want to be the reason our democracy fails, but I don't want to be one of the idiots just sitting around on their ass either.

I think both parts are right, but maybe more balanced. If millennials could afford to protest AND thought it was effective, they would.

I actually like the “no economic activity” protests, but they are possible for me because of my privilege. Not everyone can just not work or buy things, especially when on paycheck to paycheck.

Money talks right now. It would take collective action and new movement to break folks out of their slowing inertia. They’ve shoved a lot, and like you said, results have been mixed. We got a lot of change, but now the Sisyphean boulder is rolling back down the hill. :/

Luigi has been the most successful person in making a difference as far as I can see in my 35 years on Earth. More people need to take a page out of his book instead of the one fascists are handing out to us saying "these are the rules, this is how you protest us".

I'll get bombed for this but oh well.

Remember this when you see all of those "boomers made this happen by accepting X,Y, & Z."

They all had lives, children, etc, and the policies/administration weren't even 1/10th as stupid and shitty as what we see now.

And no, I'm not a boomer. I just think that argument (which I've seen many times) is ridiculous. We're all trying to do the best we can, just like they did.

There are huge lists of all the new policies, investigations, reforms, and more that happened after BLM. Same lists for the women’s marches during Trump’s first term. If you still don’t believe protests accomplish anything, you are being willfully ignorant and defeatist. It takes mere seconds to find these lists and start learning.

When Bernie was running,

This is the perfection

even believe their vote matters

..that stole joy from 'better'.

Given a binary choice, one which didn't include Bernie, I hope you still made a choice instead of abdicating it.

Yeah I hear ya on all counts.