Mostly peaceful with a chance of violence
On remembering what we once knew
You’ve undoubtedly seen the phrase “mostly peaceful” used to describe protests, some of which look anything but. Let’s explore the idea assuming it is a useful attempt at nuance.
In meteorology, a mostly sunny day means that 75 to 87% of the sky is sunny. By analogy, then one could expect a mostly peaceful protest to be up to 87% (or some arbitrary threshold) peaceful. Depending on the size of the rally, which could mean many people would be doing unpeaceful things.
What exactly does that unpeaceful part entail? It could involve hate speech, which some consider violence. It could include vandalism, a term which derives from the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that menaced the Roman Empire. Unpeacefulness could involve theft and looting, or most extremely, assault and physical injury. These types of unpeacefulness have vastly different consequences, and understanding the breakdown would be helpful.
With an attempt to describe the unpeaceful part, we could have a better idea of what a “mostly peaceful” protest means. At the same time, it is probably fair to say that most protests are not completely unpeaceful as most people are mostly peaceful most of the time, so it’s not clear the “mostly peaceful” label conveys much additional information.
The real revelation and revolution came when people like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught that there was something fundamentally different about a nonviolent protest when compared to a “mostly peaceful” one. In the civil rights movement, men and women gathered and sang peaceably. People of all races marched side-by-side on Washington. If violence came, it was not from the protesters themselves. Television footage captured police using firehoses on crowds or police dogs biting children. Dr. King believed that moral people would be outraged by what they saw, and change would come. As Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The results are undeniable. Britain peaceably departed from India and the United States ended segregation and passed sweeping civil rights legislation.
Fast-forward to today, the “mostly peaceful” protest images from L.A. depict burning cars and people waving foreign flags. These images also produce outrage, but that outrage is just as easily directed to the protestor as their cause. It appears that these protestors have a belief in a universe which bends only to power with little faith in our shared humanity. Yet, violence may intimidate but it doesn’t persuade. Intimidation only works until the other side grows stronger or bolder.
Dr. King explains it best, “The use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.”
Thus, we can start to peer through the fog of our modern discourse. The descriptor “Mostly peaceful” obscures more than it illuminates. To move forward, we need to hold on to what we once were fortunate to have been taught. We must acknowledge the power of true nonviolence for any chance of a brighter forecast.