| To be clear, I don't think rioting is ever morally justified. Peaceful protesting is a different matter. The issue people had with the protests this summer wasn't that they were out protesting. It was the fact that literally everything else about daily life had been upended and we were all supposed to be locked down away from friends and family, unless of course you wanted to go protest, in which case you had full government, medical, and corporate blessing to go do whatever you wanted. Then when you were at the protest, you could burn down buildings and cause untold damage to property and the media would look straight-faced into the camera and call it "mostly peaceful". Great. To that same standard the protests last week were "mostly peaceful". Hardly any of the people who actually showed up in DC were part of the storming of the capital. My point about morality is that it is a poor justification for why an action is justified in one case and not in another. It basically ends up with "it's right when I do it, and wrong when you do it." I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions the protesters this summer came to, but I can follow their line of reasoning and see why it is something they felt strongly about. In the same manner, you might not agree that there is a evidence that vote counts were manipulated in the November election, but if you start from that assumption, I think you would agree that someone might want to protest that. I've heard it phrased that the social contract is basically, "Your rights are my responsibility." I think that's something worth striving for no matter your political position. I hope we can find the will to de-escalate things on both sides to the point that we can actually work towards that goal. |