Civil Unrest

I know something of this subject based on first hand experience.  I went to college in the late '60s and early '70s.  I caught the tail end of the Civil Rights related unrest and was front and center for the Vietnam War unrest.  Most of this post is going to be pretty serious so let me start with a funny story from the period.

One day things were going hot and heavy.  There was a large crowd gathered at what passed for "speaker's corner" on campus.  There was street that ran along one side of the speaker's corner area.  That day a rickety truck was carefully working its way to who knows where.  Something went wrong and everyone immediately found out what the truck was carrying.  It was bees, zillions of bees.  It was instantaneously and unambiguously established that the student protesters and the bees were quite unhappy with each other.  Needless to say the crowd of students thinned quickly.

With distrust of authority running high at the time the theory quickly gained currency that the bees were some kind of plot by school administration to get back at protesters.  But it eventually turned out that it was just some bee guy who was having some kind of bee problem and had come to consult with a professor on campus.  He had brought the bees along so that the professor could see what the problem was.  The one that lost out the most was the bee guy.  In the melee he lost most of his bees.  For the rest of us it ended up being a tee hee during a period when tee hees were hard to come by.

I have talked elsewhere about what I learned by studying the "Vietnam" problem in the years after that wound down.  See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html for details.  But the same is true about Civil Unrest.  I have also outlined just how much was going on in one specific year from this period (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/08/1968.html) in another post.  I got to observe a lot of Civil Unrest first hand from the inside at that point in my life.  Afterwards I spent some time thinking about the subject.  Here is the result of that thinking.

Our society suffers from a serious case of systemic amnesia.  We have a hard time remembering what happened last week, let alone last year, or roughly 50 years ago.  The amount of civil unrest that characterized that period is much greater than anything that is now happening or has happened recently.  Not one but several bombs were detonated on the campus of the school I attended.  For a while it seemed like there were bombs going off not just on my campus but all over the place.  The amount of death and destruction associated with the Watts Riots or the MLK riots dwarfs any current or recent event now in the US.  I write this in what may turn out to be the middle of events taking place in Baltimore Maryland.  And I write this just the day after what has turned out to be an annual event in my town, the May Day Riot.

When I now watch these events I believe I am doing so with an educated eye.  As such it is disappointing to watch people who should know better display their ignorance.  The first thing they get wrong is some variation on "this has never happened before".  It may have never happened before in the professional life of the speaker.  More likely, it has happened before, even during that often short span of time, but it makes for a better story to pretend otherwise.   That is an obvious error.  Let me move on to a more subtitle one, leadership.

As I noted above there was an area that ended up functioning like a speaker's corner.  People with portable bull horns (a recent invention at the time) would get up and speechify.  The theory is that a "great leader" will get up and by the power or his logic, or more likely the power of his oratorical gifts, will  sway the crowd.  If he is truly a great leader he will soon turn the crowd into putty in his hands and be able to get them to follow him wherever he chooses to lead.  That's how it is supposed to work.

But that is not what I saw in action back in the day.  Speaker after speaker would get up and take his, and occasionally her, shot.  Sometimes it would take and sometimes it wouldn't.  It took me a long time to figure out what the rules were.  The rules were "if you say what the crowd wants to hear they are with you, otherwise they are not".  Certainly a more articulate speaker has a better shot.  And certainly a speaker with more oratorical gifts stands a better chance.  But a bad speaker saying the right things has a far better chance than the best speaker saying wrong things.

The subject, for the most part was the war in Vietnam.  Students were mostly against it for good reasons and bad.  So that wasn't the issue.  The issue was what to do.  There were a whole range of options from "do nothing" to "burn everything down".  The trick was to occupy the spot on that scale that was closest to where the listeners were.  Mostly this crowd was non-violent.  Few supported the campus bombings, which were carefully planned and executed to result in no death or injury.  That was too extreme on one end.  And no one was at the other extreme, in the "do nothing" camp.  Mostly what the crowd wanted was to have their beliefs voiced effectively.

So they wanted to demonstrate and they wanted to demonstrate at a specific level of intensity.  If you could think up a gimmick that would succeed in getting the word out, that would make you a hero.    Shutting part of campus down was ok.  Shutting everything down was too far.  Although one day after something particularly horrible had happened someone came up with the idea of walking down the I-5 freeway.  And so it came to be that the first time a freeway was shut down anywhere as part of a protest was in Seattle.  The establishment claimed at the time that this was the most horrible thing that could possibly have happened.  Now what happened that day would be seen as a normal commute.  Traffic around here has gotten that much worse since then.  To summarize, speakers advocating something that was too hot or cold didn't get anywhere with the crowd.  Speakers who hit the "Goldilocks" spot (just right) got somewhere.

What all this taught me was that "leadership" consists to a great extent of figuring out where the parade is going and getting to the front of it.  Now it may be that the parade wants to go where you want it to go.  Great!  But it will not go where it does not want to go.  Does that mean there is no role for leadership?  No!  It is just not what it is usually made out to be.

Most of us are pretty inarticulate most of the time.  A leader can take ideas that we have a hard time articulating and say them in a way that we wished we could.  A leader can also take a fuzzy, muddy concept and clarify it.  It is also true that organization is necessary to turn incoherent desire into coherent and hopefully effective action.  If there is an organization an individual can join his individual efforts can join with those of many others.  This can result in a more powerful effort that is more likely to succeed.  Finally, although a leader can't get the parade to go in an entirely different direction, the parade can be nudged into a slightly different path.  A leader can, in effect, get the parade to march down the left side of the street, the right side of the street, or the center of the street, as long as it is the right street.

Let me demonstrate this with some examples from back then and from now.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was widely acknowledged by friends and enemies alike as an inspired and inspiring orator.  He was also a great leader.  But a careful examination of his record will show a number of misses to go with the hits.  When he was assassinated in 1968 it was during a period when people had almost completely written him off.  Why?  Because he was saying unpopular things and not saying popular things.  He was still organizing and leading the same kinds of campaigns as before.  His rhetorical skills were still superior.  But it wasn't working.  Why?

He had come out against the Vietnam War.  You would think that would be a good thing.  But people within the Civil Right's movement saw it as a distraction.  And people outside the Civil Rights movement like President Johnson who had been his supporters saw this as King abandoning his friends.  So it actually turned out to be very unpopular with the people who would normally make up the membership of King's parade.  And the country had moved on.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 had been passed and enacted into law.  The immediate need to do civil rights right now was widely seen as no longer so immediate.  In short people were not interested in his message.so they tuned him out.  He was still a great orator and a great leader but people did not want to be led in the direction he wanted to lead them.

In the modern era President Obama has the same problem.  In my opinion he is a great leader and I believe history will eventually agree with me.  People may disagree with my opinion.  But, as with King, the general consensus of friends and enemies alike is that Obama is a great orator.  In 2008 when he was running for president that was enough.  But a concerted effort to undermine and block him has been successful.  Enemies hate him and despise his policies.  Friends are disappointed that he hasn't done more.  He can argue that he got as much as there was to get but that's not the kind of rhetoric that stirs the soul.  Now let's consider a noted opponent of each of these people.

In King's case Richard Nixon immediately comes to mind.  Nixon was not ever considered a great speaker.  He also is no one's idea of a leadership role model.  But he found a group of people and figured out what they wanted to hear and then told them that.  If he needed a great turn of phrase there was always a speech writer around somewhere.  That turned out to be enough.  He used this technique to get into congress and eventually into the White House.  And Nixon demonstrates something else about leadership.  You don't need to get everyone to join your parade.  You just need to get enough.

Nixon is also instructive in another way.  He used the "find the parade and get in front of it" strategy in the late '40s and early '50s to become a successful politician and nationally prominent.  He also used it to get elected President in 1968 and reelected in 1972.  But he also ran for President in 1960 and governor of California in 1962.  He lost both races after using the "I'm more experienced and competent than the other guy" argument.

That brings us to President Obama's most effective opponent, Senator Mitch McConnell.  Here again we have someone with no gift for rhetoric, soaring or otherwise.  He can make a modest claim to leadership ability as he has been in charge of the Republican contingent in the US Senate since the end of 2006.  But Mitch McConnell is not the name that comes to anyone's lips, even those of his most ardent supporters, when the subject is "great leaders".  Nevertheless, he has been quite successful.

He has been able to block many popular Obama initiatives.  This has redounded to his benefit by causing the afore mentioned disappointment among Obama supporters.  And he has orchestrated a successful effort to bring Senate Republicans from the minority to the majority.  McConnell's achievements are mostly of the negative kind.  But he has proved to be brilliant in his ability to get to the front of the parade he has chosen to lead.  He has brought voters to the Republican cause and that has cemented his position at the front of the parade of his fellow Republican Senators.

Now let me move on to the most noteworthy feature of Civil Unrest, in a word rioting.  Unfortunately, (more on this below) what makes an example of Civil Unrest noteworthy is the amount of mass destruction.  In the '60s this often involved actual death.  There were 34 deaths associated with the Watts riots in '68.  In another notable event from the period National Guardsmen killed 4 college students at Kent State University in 1970.  (Since they were white kids this event probably had a bigger impact in the end than Watts and that's sad.)  On the "and destruction" front one source lists the number of buildings damaged or destroyed in the Watts riots at roughly a thousand.  There were lots of other instances of Civil Unrest in the period.  At least one happened in the vary same Baltimore that is now back in the news.  Compared to the level of death and destruction then, recent events have been small bore.

The inciting incident in both the Ferguson and Baltimore examples was a death.  But the civil unrest that followed has so far been free of additional fatalities.  And while destruction is preferable to death I am against it for a number of reasons.  I was against it too back in the day.  So I also asked myself how it could be avoided in the future.  And, as recent events have more than amply demonstrated, there is no public solution on display.  Which leads me to my next topic, the news media.

There has been an unofficial education process going on stretching back to the civil rights activities of the '50s.  In the '50s the only technology available for procuring news "video" was the movie camera.  In ideal circumstances (an event at a fixed location where the schedule was known well in advance) a stand was set up where the bigger news organizations could put their 16mm movie cameras.  Elsewhere I am sure that 8mm "home" equipment was put to use.  But it didn't work very well.  Film was expensive.  You had to get it back to the studio so it could be developed and edited.  Then very short snippets would find there way into "newsreel" previews at the movies or onto 15 minute news broadcasts on TV.  People who became involved in "man on the street" situation did not know what was going on and just played it straight.

This was true through most of the '60s as TV stations got networked together and video tape replaced film.  TV news also went to a half hour of national news and 30-60 minutes of local news.  "Man in the street" encounters were still rare enough so that most of the public didn't know how to "game" them.  But technology marched on.  News gathering made its way into movie and TV plots and people became much more knowledgeable about the process and much more skilled at gaming the system.

Now everyone knows how the dance goes.  And average people on the street know what is expected of them when the TV cameras show up.  There are even lots of people who know how to "Jerry Springer".  Springer's long running show is about people behaving badly.  It is widely believed that most people on the show now are just making up the most outrageous behavior they can think of in an effort to get their 15 minutes of fame.  They know that everyone is in on the gag and their friends and family won't take what they see on the show seriously.

It would be nice if people only "Jerry Springer"-ed on the Springer show but they don't.  Things have gotten to the point where people are coming up to news people and critiquing them, often quite knowledgably, for covering Springer-type behavior and ignoring what is really going on .  So the expertise of the average viewer has changed a lot.  And the fact that this level of expertise is now common means that it is common knowledge that a good way to get the news media to show up is to burn something down.

This aspect of the situation has changed a lot.  Other aspects have not changed nearly as much.  In thinking about civil unrest and how to avoid it I came to the conclusion that the news media has a very important role.  "If it bleeds it leads" (a variation  on Springer-think) is now no longer a secret, as I indicated above.  So this leads to more "burn it down" going on, right?  Well, actually not.  The part of society that is outside the news business has concluded that the disadvantages of a "burn it down" strategy outweigh the advantages.  So, in spite of how well it works if your objective is to get on TV, there is remarkably little "burn it down" going on.  But this is in spite of how the news business operates not because of it.  I think that's bad.

There is a way for the news business to make a positive contribution.  Unfortunately it requires them to move away from the current "if it bleeds it leads" story selection model. They don't have to move completely away.  But they need to make different news decisions having to do with demonstrations.  Frankly, I can't figure out how the news business decides what level of coverage to give a demonstration.  If violence breaks out and there is video, of course it is covered.  But sometimes non-violent demonstrations are covered and sometimes they aren't.  They sometimes cover small demonstrations and frequently don't cover big ones. There doesn't seem to be a consistent rule.

The events in Baltimore exactly illustrate the problem.  There was little or no news coverage of large non-violent demonstrations surrounding earlier events similar to the Gray event.  There was little or no news coverage of the large non-violent demonstrations after the death of Freddie Gray but before the rioting took place.  That results in people feeling that they are voiceless and powerless.  At some point someone thinks "time for a fire".  If there is no alternative then it should not be surprising if thought eventually morphs into action.

So far the Baltimore situation has involved exactly one day of rioting.  This was not due to anything the authorities did nor was it a result of anything the news media did.  In fact, one of the features of post riot news coverage has been the count down clock.  A 10 PM curfew has been imposed.  Many news stations have run clocks counting down to 10 PM.  This is an open invitation for riots to break out on the stroke of zero.  It is hard to think of a more obvious invitation to mischief than that.  Anyone interested in mischief is guaranteed a large audience that have been put on to the edge of their seats.  There is some modest justification for this particular behavior.  There is no justification for their pre-riot behavior.

And its not just Baltimore.  In the run up to the 2003 Iraq war there were large anti-war demonstrations in my home town of Seattle and in other places.  There was almost no news coverage of this.  The result is that people like Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who carried water for the Bush Administration in the run up to the war, can claim with a straight face in her new book that there was no one making a case against going to war.

I believe it is incumbent on the news media to cover a demonstration, especially if it is peaceful, if you can get a large number of people to turn out.  It's news.  It also gives voice to the frustrated.  Often people are willing to settle for a fair hearing.  If they get one and they lose the argument they may be unhappy but they don't feel powerless .  So a part of the coverage needs to include an airing of their position.

Often public opinion is one sided because people are only exposed to one side of an issue.  Now it may be that there is only one sensible side of an issue.  I think most of the arguments advanced by the pro-gun people are nuts.  But if they can get a big enough group of people to show up somewhere then that should get them some coverage.  I think eventually people figure out who makes sense and who doesn't.

What gets covered and what doesn't depends to some extent on the prejudices of news organizations.  But it depends even more strongly on business reality.  "If it bleeds it leads" gets ratings.  Higher ratings gets more ad revenue which keeps the business in business.  Covering non-violent protests will not help their ratings.  But it is the business they are in.  I believe that the lack of investment in non-sexy news had led to a deterioration in the amount of trust and respect accorded news organizations by the public.  And I believe that has been bad for business in the long run.

Pretty much all of the news business is struggling financially.  It is another example of the kind of short term thinking that pervades so much of what passed for "smart" business these days.  It made a number of business operations a lot of money for a long time (as measured by Wall Street) but it is not working very well at the moment.  Unfortunately, in the same way it took trust in the news business a long time to erode, it will take a long time to build it back.

There is another issue where recent events resonates with past events.  In Baltimore the neighborhood CVS Pharmacy was burned out.  Pretty much everyone, with the possible exception of a few of the people actually responsible, thought this was a bad idea.  The community lobbied hard to get the store located where it was.  And it provided a service that many in the community found necessary and important.  It is not clear if CVS will rebuild.  Certainly, on one would blame them if they chose not to.  And that echoes what took place in the '60s.  Most of the burning and looting happened in the local neighborhood.  It has been noted that parts of what used to be the business district of Baltimore has still not been rebuilt since it was burned down in the '60s.  It seems counterproductive to burn out your own community.  So why is that what seems to inevitably get burned?

The answer is pretty obvious.  These people don't have a lot of resources.  They burn what they can get to.  But it is a bad idea long term.  And nearly immediately after the one night of rioting in Baltimore it was obvious that most residents in the affected areas were well aware of this.  Movements broke out immediately to clean things up and make sure the rioting was not able to start up again.

It is too soon to tell if it is for real or not but it has been widely reported that the Crips, Bloods, and other gangs have declared a truce and gone into "law and order" mode.  They are stepping in and playing the role of the police in the current absence of the real police.  The gangs claim this is not some kind of protection racket.  A contributing factor to this surprising development is the past absence, according to many citizens, of effective policing by the real police.  Things like this have a way of falling apart as time passes.  So some time will have to pass before we will know if this development is what it appears to be or not.

Finally, I want to cover one more issue.  And to do so I want to circle back to something I opened this piece with.  And that's the annual May Day riot in Seattle.  It came off this year in pretty much the same way it has in the last few years.  It is important to know that while it is now an annual event it actually has a known starting point.

In 1999 the World Trade Organization (WTO) held a big conference in Seattle.  Steam had been building up for some time among a number of activist groups to try to make some noise and the WTO meeting seemed the perfect opportunity.  Everybody knew this.  So both sides geared up for a lot of activity.  Lots of "anti" groups geared up to descend on the town with the intention of staging big protests.  The police and various government agencies geared up to be ready to handle the protests. 

Now Seattle is not like Baltimore.  It's pretty liberal and at that time the Police Chief was very liberal.  He tried to reach out and do some co-ordination.  He wanted to give the protesters plenty of opportunity to vent but he wanted to keep things peaceful and under control.  The protest organizers, even the pacifist ones were having none of this.

Things got completely out of control.  Most of the protesters wanted to confine their protesting to marching around, perhaps blocking streets and so forth but they were not into violence and property destruction.  But then there were the anarchists.  They were into some serious mayhem.  Their plan was to blend in with the larger peaceful groups.  Then they would peal off, quickly wreck some havoc, then filter back into the larger protests confident they could blend in.  They had masks and other simple disguises to facilitate this plan.  The anarchist plan worked to perfection.  Everything else was a complete mess.

The police were underprepared for the activities of the anarchists and the non-anarchist protesters were un-cooperative.  The police over-reacted and reacted incompetently.  The result was more chaos than the anarchists could have possibly predicted.  If you are an anarchist, chaos is your objective.  The rest of the protesters saw whatever message they were trying to get out drowned in coverage of tear gas and broken glass.  The cops looked like incompetent thugs.  The anarchists won and everyone else lost.

I did not understand the reluctance of the nonviolent protest organizers to work with the police.  Part of it might initially have stemmed from the fact that the police wanted them to stick to a schedule, stay in designated areas, and not block streets.  In short, they were supposed to be good little protesters.  And I think there was a significant amount of mistrust on the part of the protesters when it came to the police.  But I believe that the Mayor and the Police Chief sincerely wanted to give the protesters a fair shake.  (I'm guessing the protest organizers would disagree with this sentiment.)  But after the event, I don't understand the total lack of cooperation.

The anarchists made the protesters look bad. The cops may have come off looking worse but that didn't help the protesters or their causes. They still looked pretty bad when the tear gas cleared.  I thought there would have been at least some co-operation by the protesters to try to identify and round up the worst of the bad actors.  It would have given the protesters a way to make up for the damage done by the anarchists.  But there was nothing.  That was a mistake because average people conflated the anarchists with the peaceful protesters.  And that has done the protesters and what they care about a lot of harm since.

And so things stayed for nearly fifteen years.  People on both sides have dug in.  There seems to be a great deal to support the idea that the Baltimore Police are part of the problem and not part of the solution.  Certainly, there are still factions within the Seattle Police that share that sentiment.  Seattle is one of several cities under a "consent decree" with the Justice Department over bad behavior.  More than a hundred cops joined a law suit challenging implementation of the decree.

But I see some motion in the wake of Ferguson.  The early days of Ferguson were bungled (polite characterization) badly.  But after a few days the cops backed off and things went much more smoothly.  And there was no talk of permits and staying on the sidewalk and that sort of thing.  Baltimore moved to a more sensible approach much more quickly than Ferguson did.  People need space to vent.  If you give them that space things will become much less uncivil and return to civility more quickly.

But that still leaves us with the actual bad actors.  Not a few teenagers who go too far but the anarchists who wrecked so much havoc at the WTO conference in Seattle in '99 and who burned the buildings and cars in Baltimore that night.  Seattle, then or now, would have been a good place to start.  As I indicated, this May Day thing has settled into a routine.  The peaceful protesters show up in large numbers during the day.  They protest peacefully during the day.  Then evening comes.  The number of protesters goes down but an anarchistic component now makes its presence felt.  And there is an incident.  There always seems to be an incident.  I suppose you can say the police come off looking bad.  But how does that advance the cause of any of the groups that protest peacefully?  And the anarchists seem to get away with it so there is no reason for them to stop showing up.  So every year we go through the same dance.  That's not progress.  There is only the thinnest of excuses for the peaceful protesters to fail to help.  Frankly, the excuse is too thin.  Their behavior needs to change.

I understand why the community finds Baltimore police so untrustworthy.  The situation is much worse in Baltimore than it is in Seattle.  Given that it is hard to argue that Baltimore is the place to start.  But peaceful protesters need to understand that they get tarred with the same brush as the violent ones.  It is obvious that most of the people who live in the most affected neighborhoods of Baltimore understand that.  So maybe Baltimore will find a way to lead where Seattle so far hasn't.

All that is necessary is to upload some video to YouTube then make an anonymous tip to the authorities.  Maybe that has already happened.  If it has then the news media doesn't know it or they have decided not to report it.  Every day it become more and more obvious how little privacy is left in situations where there is a lot of interest.  This is a situation where that very lack of privacy can have a beneficial impact.