Leaderboard

Mel Hopkins I will be checking into the forums more know that there is a companion voice to Cynique. Thank you.

Right up until Saturday, I also believed marching and protesting were a waste of time. I've only marched in "Save our Sports" protest in '79 at Brooklyn Tech. <- @Troy (did you march to the board of education?) A lot of high school students converged of BoE and we won! But as I got older it was my belief that we should use the time to draft legislation and find a senator/ representative to sponsor the bill for us just as ALEC did with the "stand your ground" legislative proposal. Then a little before Saturday, I began to remember what marching and protesting was all about. It raises awareness. It forces the news media to do their job. It puts the poor folks concerns in the national lexicon - a news article sprinkled here and there can't do it. Nationally/Globally, no one paid attention to the wealth disparity until Occupy Wall Street movement brought it to our attention. Now we do studies on the 99% vs 1% to find ways to achieve equity. There's probably no one on the planet who doesn't know black lives matters - and police will go to jail for killing unarmed civilians (well at least here in Georgia). As for the corporatists and their leader DJT - I agree with you, I don't think marching will have an impact on them either. It will, however, keep him and his minions spinning.

Troy here's a link to the cities that had marches, not St Petersburg in Florida is on the list. https://www.womensmarch.com/sisters/ Firstly the March on March wasn't just about Trump it was about equality. If you go to March on March they have photos from all over the World. And they have a 100 day action plan. I didagree Troy by April 21, 2017 the TRump Presidency will look very different. Donald Trump is the most unifying divisive President. I have said that before and will keep saying. It will be similar to my saying Trump could be President when very few people thought so. He is not bullet proof. H is going to be one of the most important president's ever. I feel sorry for him because he is going to have some very public failures, which he has earned.

The challenge with this strategy is it undermines the overarching goal of eliminating sexism and inequality. It plays into the narrative that women don't enjoy sex and instead use it as a weapon or a bartering chip. This doesn't change society's structure it reinforces it. Plus, it's a lie. Some intimate the strategy was used in Liberia and Ghana - but it was actually peaceful marches and protest that allowed them elect their first woman president - Also it did however have a short-term effect of stopping a civil war. It didn't change the overall structure of the patriarchal culture. Change is gradual - and those oppressed women you speak of...they are in the first stage "Awareness". I do agree with you about our dysfunctional relationship with western ideals -We've been living under it for about 5,000 years and I suspect it's like a bad relationship - it's hard to break up because it's a habit. A bad habit and we all know how hard those are to break. 2021... and the council of foreign relations and other think tanks would disagree. Those groups and I credit Occupy Wall Street for making it a thing. Here's the list by states . The film "Pray the Devil back to Hell" and Women of Liberia mass movement proved the opposite.

Mel the minimum wage as increased incrementally before many of the Occupy protestors were even born. The link you provided says that NY State will increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2021! This does not seem like a resounding win worth boasting about and that is assuming that you can attribute the change solely to Occupy (the article did not make this assertion). I have protested in the past. We even occupied on an office building on Syracuse University's campus. But I was less of an activist and more of young adult experimenting, learning who I was. Real, substantive change only seems to come by force. America was founded by force, slavery ended by force, Hitler was stopped by force. Power only answers to force. I have little hope that marching will change anything-- unless the changes you are looking for is a few extra bucks phased in over several years.... Right now the powerful are boldly snatching even more power. The republican legislators who the marchers are supposedly influencing were completely impotent as Trump bum-rushed their party. They are useless; marching to influence them is a waste of time--unless some serious financial pressure can be brought to bear.

People really have deified MLK, because his death turned him into a martyr and people consider infallible. Were he alive today, I don't think King could've reversed the erosion of the civil rights gains, or that he would've had a repeat victory in post-racial America. The reason there is a need to re-address racism is because it never went away; like many diseases, it just went into remission. Movements go through phases before their goal can become a pillar of society. The Civil Rights movement has yet to reach the final stage where racial equality is institutionalized. The Black Lives Matter movement is stuck in the same phase as the incompleted civil rights movement because neither has taken permanent root in the American landscape due to a lingering reluctance to relinquish white entitlement. I think King would've been very distressed by how the violence he so abhorred has erupted in the inner cities where black-on-black crime is rampant. In view of that, he might've suspended marching for white acceptance and focused more on blacks coming together to love and respect each other.

@Troy @Pioneer1Yes, the demonstration was a spectacle that made white women feel good about themselves. (And yes, black women have always been "liberated", taking up the slack while waiting for the brothers to "man up".) But the tremendous, world-wide outpouring was also an annoyance to Donald Trump, inasmuch as the message it sent tarnished his image. Anything that doesn't make Trump feel good about himself forces him to confront his inadequacies and this throws him off his game. To combat this, his sycophants have shifted into an alternate universe where lies are recycled as "alternate facts" and Trump's followers accept these lies because they don't want to believe that he is misleading them. For his opponents, an effective defense against this strategy is to become creative nuisances who mock him with the truth. Using the ballot to unseat opponents is also a strategy that is on the Feminist agenda and this is a good thing.

@Pioneer1 , @Troy Are your comments based in facts, local observation and/or is it just how you feel personally? For example, I can't refute the way someone feels about a topic - we all have our beliefs and our beliefs and emotions mirror our observations of our world. BUT if you are purportedly presenting facts then... There was a study done on marching and the number of marches on a single topic are in direct correlation to how legislators vote...(Protest and congressional behavior: Assessing Racial and Ethnic Minority Protest in the District by Daniel Q. Gillion The Journal of Politics Vol 74, No.4 (Oct., 2012), pp. 950-962) Or the Women's March wasn't just a big city thing - there were Women's Marches on all 7 continents - yes even on a ship in Antarctica. For those women, Climate Change is real - and they want to be heard. Several of the most conservative cities including some from Mesa, Arizona (the MOST conservative city in the U.S. according to The Economist) held sattelite Women's March. It's documented - I even retweeted pictures from those unlikely spots. Edit to add the Tampa Bay Area Tampa -St Petersburg boast 20,000 turned out for their satellite Women's March Also, here's the mission and vision of the Women's March - here's the link . The overarching goal is to upend the more than 5,000 years of patriarchal rule and return our culture to the egalitarian culture it once was.

MLK and the people around him would have been on Twitter trying to figure out how to reach an audience. They would have been rendered mute in today's world; where popularity is determined by corporate entities revenue rather than what nurtures their auduence. Right now the flavor of the day is Black Lives Matters, corporate media can't wrap their stubby little fingers around the concept of more than one activist organization at a time.

What would Dr King think about these issues? This question is posed as if the Right Reverend Doctor would have been just some passive observer not actively involved in solving the problems of the Black community. Martin was a TRUE activist in the sense that he actually took action himself as well as effectively mobilized others to take action to address the injustices he saw in society. My sense is, if he were alive today that question would be a classical moot point because I doubt that many of the problems listed would even exist or atleast not be AS SERIOUS as they are for him to worry himself with.....because he would have addressed most of them in their infancy stage before they had progressed. He would have mobilized the Black community to nip them in the bud, so to speak.

yes