When YOU Take the Streets…

October 15, 2020 | revcom.us

When YOU take the streets, then you set the terms. People have to respond, one way or the other. If taking the streets shakes people up, and makes them think, makes them question, even makes them angry—good. Step one is breaking people out of “it’s all good”—or “it’s all bad, and there’s nothing I can do.” If you’re in the streets, you are a living refutation of both.

When YOU take the streets, you define the debate. Think about what happened after the ugly, brutal murder of George Floyd by the police—the terms changed from “it’s really a shame, but the police are just doing their job and there’s really not that much we can do” to “the murder of George Floyd is outrageous and intolerable, his killers need to be charged and jailed, and everyone needs to be in the streets—and everywhere else—asking why this happens and demanding top to bottom change to make it stop.” People took the streets—and suddenly not only were statues coming down, but discussions were going on everywhere about the true history and present-day character of this society, and what needed to be done to change it—now.

When YOU take the streets, you cause different sections of the rulers to move in different ways. Do you think the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military—Mark Milley—would have been compelled to break with his commander-in-chief, the fascist Trump, and to apologize for being with him at that church photo-op and using his troops against nonviolent protesters without people standing up and staying in the streets? Not out of the goodness of his heart—but because YOU were in the streets and YOU were having an effect on everyone and everything, and he began to worry about his own armed forces holding together and the way the whole society was looking at the problems you were so powerfully pointing to.

But when THEY—the fascists, the Trumpites—saw this, they were freaked and they were furious. So THEY took the streets, with their thugs and guns, and tried to change things back. THEY—the fascists, the Trumpites—tried to make the terms “what do we do about rioting and looting” and “law and order”—even as THEY surrounded and hounded and shot and killed and drove cars into people. When THEY took the streets it became all about “the grievances of Trump’s angry base” and the Democrats making concessions, as if the lies and slanders and racism and murder is somehow valid.

Now WE, in our hundreds and thousands now and growing into millions, need to take the streets and re-set the terms and demand that THIS FASCIST REGIME BE DRIVEN FROM POWER. We need to be in the streets to ring the alarm to millions on what this regime is threatening to do: steal the elections and wreak violence and prison on those who resist. WE need to call out the millions of people who love justice and decency to come back into the streets. WE with our actions need to inspire and organize them to say, in loud, united and graphic terms to Trump and Pence and Barr and the rest: DON’T YOU DARE!

We need to make clear: The very act of making those threats is more than cause enough to drive these fascists from office. NOW—before they can carry them out. Then, if the election does happen—and yes, YOU MUST VOTE—we’ll be in a position where we can actually have a chance at fighting through against any chicanery and treachery from these fascists. In the main, essential and most important way to fight it: with millions in the streets.

WE need to show the nonviolent, creative, courageous moral certitude of our movement to the whole world, growing and growing, day after day: Trump/Pence OUT NOW.

WE need to take back the streets: now.