I don’t go to them, anymore. I’ve watched so many of them happen since that ass clown got elected, and like I guess cool that people now care enough to march, but the entire thing rubs me the wrong way.

These marches have permits handed down by the same state apparatus that creates the context for the march. A protest with a permit isn’t a protest— it’s a parade.

Cops are there to make sure you stick to a predefined route. The whole spectacle is allowed to go on because they know you’ll blow off steam, pat yourself and your friends on the back for it, post the best signs to social media, and that the state machine will continue to toss people into the mill and grind us down. They don’t bring about change. They don’t even really inconvenience anyone.

I went to the first Women’s March in NYC, and all I could think was how ludicrous it was that we had a pre-assigned path with street closures announced in advance, and yesterday’s march was no different. I kept comparing it to when we marched, organically, after the Mike Brown murder verdict, after the Eric Garner murder verdict. We took over streets. We shut down parts of Manhattan, tunnels and roads in and out of the city.

And people were PISSED. Even rich liberals were up in arms yelling about how they couldn’t get across town (boo hoo). The marches weren’t there to put pictures on social media— they were there to disrupt people’s daily experience. The problem was that they kept to the same routes, to the point where it became expected. We let the cops guide us too much by the later days and the tactic lost effectiveness. It got cold.

We never marched through the Upper East Side, for example, which I always thought was a mistake. By the end, we were just marching among like minded people, again. Here we go through the Village and NYU students; here we go through Times Square where there’s already a million people, anyway; here we go through the liberal Upper West Side to Columbia U to Harlem.

The best days, the days where it felt like people had to listen, were when we took the highways, when we shut down 5th Ave., when we blocked the bridges and tunnels.

They were also the days when I was most scared, when I experienced first hand that cops are NOT your friends and will intimidate, physically threaten, and rush you en masse to then arrest you for running from a weapon wielding threat of violence.

Every time I see a post thanking the cops for how they acted during a “political protest,” it makes me fucking ill.

@SuzanEraslan comparing your experience (and those of others) with the palpable blind terror in cops’ faces as thousands of people descended on Chicago’s airport (which is NOT a convenient trip for anyone) in a spontaneous travel ban protest and literally shut down the terminal is illuminating

the power of a protest is how quickly it can turn into a riot, and they drained it of power before the event started