The right to protest is embedded in our Constitution as part of the amendment that came and is first.
Citizens have the right to freedom of speech, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
The right to protest is, thus, thrice protected by the First Amendment.
It is obvious that this fundamental and sacred right has nothing to do with a right to riot.
But, as economist and social critic Thomas Sowell has commented, we seem to have to remind ourselves every few years that there is also no moral or legal excuse for rioting.
As Americans we should fiercely protect the right to protest.
We should also firmly and consistently oppose rioting, no matter how just the cause of people who turn to violence and no matter how much we may sympathize with the people who riot.
People who are not Black should try to listen to advocates of Black Lives Matter and try, so far as it is possible, to understand the Black experience in America, especially as it relates to the justice system.
People of privilege should also try to understand the plight of the poor white Appalachian.
Once, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King dreamed of uniting all disenfranchised people — as allies not enemies. It is a dream deferred and now almost forgotten. And we need to rediscover and renew the dream.
As the singer/songwriter Neil Young, a fierce opponent of Donald Trump, recently said: The people who support Donald Trump should not be seen by fellow Americans who oppose Mr. Trump as enemies.
The sad irony of left and right in America today is that both sides feel disrespected, disenfranchised and powerless, when, in truth, neither really is.
But love the sinner; punish the sin. People who riot — burn, break, loot, bully and punch — are not exercising freedom of speech or the right to assemble and petition for redress of grievances.
And people who do these things are rioting. They are breaking the law and should be punished.
No cause justifies burning police cars or burning down police stations or tearing down public statues, as happened last summer.
And feeling disenfranchised cannot justify beating one Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher and another nearly to death with flagpoles, as happened Jan. 6 at the Capitol.
No cause can dignify mob violence.
Some will say that many in the mob at the Capitol were people who felt they had no remedy for an election they felt was stolen. That is false. They had the courts. They lost in the courts. That left them the option of peaceful protest — like the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s.
They chose violence instead, and, by attacking the citadel of democracy itself, insurrection.
No cause dignifies mob violence.
In 1972, thousands of anti-war protesters descended on a heavily guarded Washington, D.C. The city didn’t need to be armed. The protesters came, and marched, in peace.
When Dr. King, and John Lewis, and Andrew Young, and so many others led protests of systemic racism and legal discrimination in America in the 1960s, they taught an entire movement the philosophy and methodology of nonviolent resistance. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that Dr. King understood intuitively, as well as from his study of Gandhi, that nonviolence gives the protester the moral high ground, the avenue of dialogue and persuasion, and a chance to prevail, which violent resistance never gives those who are outnumbered.
Despite the glorification of violence in American culture, from the Old West to “Dirty Harry,” the violent and rioting protester is no hero and no patriot. He is no better than a would-be assassin or a terrorist.
But Dr. King also linked nonviolent protest to the first and greatest amendment. This is our heritage, our guarantee, and our responsibility as Americans. We are all granted the right to peaceful protest. And we should stand firm for our neighbor’s ability to exercise that right as well as our own.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS
