What course of action would be best? That’s a very serious question in our present circumstances. Hemmed in by curfews and lines of cops, almost any action any more is civil disobedience. I’ve seen a lot of soft civil disobedience in the last few days. I just read about a terrific example that took place this evening: Stevante Clark, brother of Stephon Clark, murdered by Sacramento police in 2018 when they claimed they thought his white iPhone was a gun, led a group of demonstrators after the curfew around downtown, completely peacefully (I’d already gone home, not feeling it was warranted to challenge a curfew against a background of looting). They marched from Cesar Chavez Park to the DA’s office (who “exonerated” the cops who shot his brother), and back to the park, under the guns and eyes of 500 National Guardsmen and a division of cops. They cops and soldiers didn’t twitch. They only watched. At the end of it, an hour into curfew, everyone dispersed peacefully.

It’s an important distinction now that Trump is threatening to send heavily armed regular military troops to suppress peaceful demonstrations. That, for me, would cross the line, and I’d have no choice but to join the demonstrators who’d resist with soft civil disobedience. The last time it failed in America was at Kent State, when National Guardsmen were ordered to open fire, and obeyed. But in all other instances, as Gandhi showed, soft civil disobedience has a devastating effect on soldiers and cops armed and told to employ lethal violence against their fellow citizens.

The use of military force in a civil situation is always a bluff. Their flashbang grenades are a bluff, as is the tactic of marching down the street banging their shields with clubs. In the last few days I’ve watched experienced demonstrators ignore the sound of flashbangs, having learned that it’s a bluff. That lone man in Tienanmen Square called the bluff of a tank. The young woman who planted a flower in the gun of a soldier at the Pentagon during an antiwar demonstration called his bluff.

If Trump sends in the troops, we must call his bluff.

That’s my feeling, sitting safe at home, listening to helicopters and bullhorns in the distance; people are out there defying the curfew. And it’s not a choice everyone can make, or should make. But for me, there’s a limit, a moral threshold that our deranged President just might cross. And I hope I have the courage to respond.

Conflicted as to what course of action would be best. The Trump presidency is turning out to be every bit as devastating as I feared, and has started to surpass my darkest imaginings.

The only certainty- the only thing you can count on with Trump- is that its going to get a LOT worse. Yes, I have said that over and over – but have I been wrong yet?

This gets unbearably worse up until the election. If Trump loses, then December will be calamitous- I am serious when I say I think we will be lucky to survive it. And if he steals the election, then well, surviving won’t be such a blessing… even his supporters will learn that the hard way.

There is a madman in the white house, and he will burn the world down before he is forced out. We know it, and his supporters know it… the difference is THEY are vicarious arsonists- they don’t CARE if he burns down the world as long as its their man doing it, and they get to hang on just long enough to savor the screams of those they hate.

I feel a sense of unreality about all this. There’ve been few injuries to people (all inflicted by the cops), just property damage. I get a sense of a game between demonstrators and police, in part because the physical geography of downtown and midtown Sacramento is a grid, like a game board. Yesterday one large group of several thousand clustered at the Capitol, listening to speeches and chanting call-and-response: “Say his name”, “George Floyd”, and so on. Another group of a thousand or so roamed the grid, almost playing a game with the cops. They’d march a few blocks, and the cops would move in to block them, and the demonstrators would pivot to move a few squares in another direction. The cops would block, they’d pivot, and the game went on.

I have a couple of hours before curfew, so I’m out to gawk and spectate. I’m sure it’s safe enough–I’m on the side of the demonstrators, and white enough to escape the full wrath of the cops.

…Was an african american man- Crispus Attucks.
Of course today’s ‘patriotic’ MAGA morons would simply say he had it coming- if he hadn’t been involved in a riot, then he wouldn’t have been shot…

“Redcoat lives matter too!”

Or maybe some third party, with an agenda all their own?

Or maybe some fool’s piece just went off prematurely.