Thursday, June 23, 2016

Stand up by Sitting In




It's one of those days folks. After carefully crafting a brilliant blog today (hey, I can live in my fantasy world) it disappeared as I was posting it. Where did it go people?!

I wrote about the history of sit-ins and their prevalence in the 1960s and 70s. We rarely hear about this protest phenomenon anymore, but there is a sit-in going on in the House in Washington. Democrats are protesting the Republicans' intransigence on passing any legislation restricting gun sales, despite the madness of mass shootings in America.



They have been chanting like it's 1966, when there were sit-ins protesting the war in Vietnam and probably still a few related to civil rights. One of the current protestors is 76-year-old John Lewis, who as a 19-year-old got involved with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and marched across the Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama. He was involved in sit-ins as a teen, and is doing so again as a senior. He is a remarkable man.



Some silly Republicans have been huffing that this protest has no relationship to the civil rights protests. Yet as the poster above indicates, guns create unprecedented carnage in the US.

Do protests, including sit-ins, make a difference? Were you ever involved in one? Did you wear flowers in your hair?

Since I posted Lewis offered this about the protest "We got in trouble. We got in the way. Good trouble. Necessary Trouble. By sitting-in, we were really standing up"

2 comments:

Judy said...

One has to wonder what it is going to take to make Americans see how stupid their stubbornness is .... the stats show the reality - can they not read and understand the numbers ???

Frank said...

You just can't tell a Heinz pickle anything!

No point trying to reason with a mind that's already made up, with anything as confusing as the facts.