Last November, when the WTO converged on Seattle, the police ensured people's First Amendment rights by marking about two blocks of sidewalk as the legal protest area.
After the riots, which I consider to be quite small, all things considered, there were a few things left to consider:
* Our mayor declared marshal law in the name of the First Amendment.
* For several days, the sale of a gas mask to a civilian was illegal throughout the county.
* When the dust settled, the police supporters' number one tagline was, "We could have avoided this if the protesters had just stayed where they were told to."
And in the meantime, the delegates were packing heat. Thank god for diplomatic immunity, eh? Starting a riot by pointing an unregistered pistol at an unarmed civilian is a bright, bright idea.
That particular riot could have been avoided, had the police arrested the property aggressors (who were in identifiable
uniform). But they waited until the property damage ceased and the aggressors disappeared before assailing the thousands of demonstrators with tear gas. In the US, people aren't used to rubber or wood bullets. But they weren't surprised when the police department began using them, except that the police department had, only a couple of hours earlier, publicly declared that
the police had no rubber or wooden bullets.
But from the moment the police declared a small, removed zone of sidewalk as the only legal protest area around the WTO,
everybody knew there was a better than 50-50 shot of a riot. They still launched the tear gas, though, just to make sure.
Of course riots are dumb. But the things leading up to them are dumber. Such is the case with war. Certainly the American Revolution didn't solve everything, but of the War of 1812 ... when did the British Empire
ever understand that it was time to leave? Technically, the Civil War accomplished nothing but the bloody deflowering of the Declaration of Independence. But their aftermath--the things and ideas wars cause--are more potent societal transformers than the wars themselves.
I wanted to pick on the rest of your list, too ... it's kind of a fun list:
* Bull running is a dumb tradition in its own right, but so are all traditions, really. To me, the tradition of running away from a herd of pissed-off bulls is no dumber than the American "tradition" of making your son into a man by taking him into the woods to kill something.
* Tomato fight ... okay, I live in the west half of Washington state. We're divided by the Cascade mountains, and the east side is largely farmland and desert plateau. If you drive through the farmland, at each farm you'll see huge piles of grain with pipes coming out of the center of the pile. The grain is awaiting use, and the pipe is cooling the center of the pile against a flashburn. There are subsidies to pay farmers for this grain if it isn't sold, and much of it isn't sold. Let them waste tomatoes. Let's ship the grain to Africa.
* I think it takes humanity, in general, a while to learn some things. When we came together in cities, we could no longer rip each other senseless at will. Thus, bloodsports. It took a while to work that lethal streak out of us. After all, we still have boxing, various sports of swordplay, and organized prizefights where, every once in a while, someone actually gets killed. Sure, we're not feeding Christians to the lions, but can you imagine the stink PETA would raise?
* The only thing I can say about smashing guitars is let them smash all the Charvels and ESPs they can get their hands on. I'm sad about the Les Pauls that Townsend destroyed, but not just for smashing the Paganini of electric guitars: Gibson ran an entire forest into the ground making that guitar; the '59 came from a forest that can never be regrown, the wood was unique as the sustain implies; never again can we build it the same way. We can only compensate with electronics.
And I've babbled about riots and war; suffice to say that any mass violence is dumb. But people chose to settle their differences that way. Much like bloodsports, it's a learning process. Eventually we'll figure out how unhealthy war is. And someday we'll figure out how unhealthy it is to anger a population to riot.
But we're the human race; right now the only thing that can stop us is ourselves. (If the aliens land in the next 24 hours, I
will laugh about that.)
I live in a region where the voting constituency frequently chooses financial return over social infrastructure. We'll spend what it takes to build commerce, but raising money for education is like bleeding pavement. Material greed is a stupidity I'd tack onto your list. While I can't speak for the bulls, I think the rest of that list leans heavily on human greed.
thanx much,
Tiassa
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We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and important to us. (Ranier Maria Rilke)
