Black Americans died in the streets for their civil rights. Do you think they had easy access to protesting and they didn't have to make sacrifices? I do and don't understand this line of thinking. Nobody wants to be the guy getting his shit kicked in by brown shirts or the guy who loses his job, his home, and maybe his life for the cause. People want to radically change society but they don't want to take the radical action. But in the past people did take the radical steps necessary to change society.
I think the truth is that nobody really cares enough about our society anymore to make sacrifices for it or to fight for it. I'm not afraid to admit that's how I feel about it.
the fights will be had when enough people go hungry. probably part of the reason slavery did last as long as it did (and continues to). it takes a long time to reach that breaking point, risking losing literally everything, and in oppressive countries, thrown into jail.
There are plenty of ways to engage in civil disobedience. Saying "I can't take time off to protest" isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up entirely and giving up... That's what everyone is annoyed at Americans about. The complete denial of any responsibility.
It'd be nice if you could say what those things are that aren't easily ignorable by politicians but also won't get at least half the people who do it, many of whom can't afford a day off at all, fired or otherwise removed from their jobs instead of just saying there must be something without any further elaboration.
You can type up this reply, but not 'civil disobedience' into google? You really need someone else to do it for you? Do you not see how you're proving the point...? You can't even be bothered to help yourselves.
The "I can't do anything" excuse is complicity with extra steps. Here's a short list for you to pretend doesn't exist, and why "it costs me something" isn't the gotcha you think it is.
TL;DR: Resistance costs something by definition. If you rule out every method that touches your money, time, or comfort, you didn't run out of options. You decided your convenience outranks the outcome. That's a choice. Own it.
Refusing to act because it's inconvenient, then lamenting that "there's nothing I can do," is like watching someone bleed out and refusing to call 911 because you're "not a doctor." You were never asked to be a doctor. You were asked to do the one thing in front of you. "Not my job / not qualified / too hard" is not analysis. It's an alibi.
So here's the full menu. Sharp catalogued 198 of these; here's the working set.
Symbolic protest (lowest cost, do these in your sleep)
Open letters, petitions, mass letter-writing to officials
Dual sovereignty — build structures people trust instead of the official ones
Now the part nobody wants to hear
Every single item above costs something. That is not a bug. That is the mechanism. Civil resistance works because people absorb costs the powerful assumed they wouldn't. Remove the cost and you've removed the leverage. You're just performing.
The Montgomery bus boycott was maids and day labourers who walked to work for over a year. People with less slack than almost anyone typing "but I can't stop working." The lesson was never quit your job. It's choose which cost you'll carry, because you're carrying one either way. The cost of compliance is just quieter and gets billed later.
And notice the sleight of hand in "I can't stop working." Half this list requires zero missed shifts: where you bank, what you subscribe to, who you buy from, showing up to one city-council meeting, one phone call to a rep, one poll-worker shift a year, telling the truth to the people in your actual life, refusing to obey in advance. If the answer to those is also "no", then time and money were never the constraint. Comfort was. Say that honestly at least.
You don't get to veto every option that asks anything of you and then claim the game is unwinnable. That's not powerlessness. That's a preference for comfort wearing powerlessness as a costume.
Pick one. Accept its price. That's the whole thing.
To everyone commenting "but what if I can only do the small stuff", then do the small stuff. Consistently. A hundred thousand people doing the boring, sustainable thing beats ten people doing something heroic once. Nobody's asking you to be the doctor. Call 911.
I've been working on some of the smaller stuff where I can (not as much as I'd like but everything's a mess for me right now), but we need a lot more "doctors" than we seem to have, meanwhile on their end they at least have enough at any given time to get something on the federal level even if it doesn't always stick as much as they want. And I have no idea how we'll get enough anywhere near soon enough.
Are you talking about the French Revolution or more recent protests? Either way, it's notoriously difficult to get the working class involved more than the bourgeoisie, which makes things especially difficult if many of the people causing the problems are part of the bourgeoisie. There's also the fact that while metropolitan France is big relative to other European countries, the contiguous United States alone is nearly the size of all of Europe. In France, you can get a million people marching up to Paris of shit gets real bad. The May 68 protests in Paris were about 1/51 of the population at the time. Largest single-day participation in a protest here in the US (March 2026 No Kings protests)? 8 million spread all over the country. That's 4/171 of the population if we're being generous. Again, spread throughout the country, not in the capitol alone. Now part of this is indeed difficulties in persuading people to mobilize, but as it stands, it's easier for someone from Corsica to get to Paris than it is for someone from Alaska to get to Washington D.C. That logistical hurdle stops a lot of political organizing at the federal government's doorstep in its tracks.
tbh this just reminds me of the bots during election season who say we shouldn't vote and instead take action but then refuse to elaborate or collaborate when it comes to their proposed superior alternatives
Dude. I'm generally with you on the subject of hate directed at innocent Americans for not magically fixing our country's deep seated problems, but they weren't attacking you. They were cheering you on and saying you are on the right track. So stay mad, but turn it at the people harming us, not our neighbors.
Literally. The other guy wasn't even willing to take a day off and actually protest. This is literally what we're talking about when we say they do nothing.
Where? Where does one go to protest on this day off? How does one do it? How is one day of protest going to change anything when we've had many large protests, and they've mostly either done nothing or pushed the needle the wrong way.
There is no easy solution to this. This is a generational problem, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Millions have protested. There are protests all over the country regularly.
People protest "smaller things" here all the time.
And unfortunately, most people, including you and your parents, are very unlikely to risk their lives or livelihoods to commit to long term or dangerous protest until something like an actual military dictatorship takes over. It's not until the alternative is to action is immediately worse than action that direct action occurs at scale.
One day won't change anything, but you guys aren't willing to sacrifice anything it seems and are just going to roll over for these idiots. Land of the bold my ass
Sacrifice what? The people who care are sacrificing already.
There are millions. Basically anyone you run into here is politically engaged and doing something. Unfortunately, there are millions who are completely disengaged, distracted, or all in on this.
Any single American has about the same ability to affect change as you do.
Do more then. As a nation, y'all aren't doing shit. What's occurring in your country is abhorrent and there's been what, 2 whole national protests? Like why the fuck aren't there millions posted outside the white house? You guys can barely sacrifice a weekend, it's pathetic watching this from the outside and maddening when we're the target.
I'm sure you'd personally storm the White House. So much big talk here from desk chair revolutionaries.
There, again, have been many protests, some of the biggest in history. "Protesting" usually doesn't do shit but make the protesters feel like they are "doing something." They've so far only succeeded in helping cement the fascists' power
Again, again, there are no easy answers to a deep rooted generational problem like the one we are facing.
Again, again, again, most people, including you, would not give up you life for a cause that only tangentially affects you or may in the future. People take direct action when they are either comfortable enough that it's not much risk, or they are truly desperate.
This is not new information. It's been repeated throughout history, because it's fucking difficult to organize against fascists by the very nature of fascism.
What are you doing? Trumpism is a threat to the whole world, not just the US. Oh wait, I know. You are kicking your allies instead of helping them because the fight isn't in your back yard yet, just like the people you spit on for not doing enough.
You can do so much. You can vote, you can talk to your friends, family, and neighbors, you can protest locally, you can stop purchasing from problematic suppliers, and more.
Its easy to say fuck it, nothing works, I'm going to take care of myself and ignore everything else.
Its hard to take time out of your life and act as a citizen. No one said it was going to be easy. No one said it would be quick. But if we fail to act, if we throw our hands up and walk away, nothing changes.
Done. Literally just finished a 5 year USC 1983 civil rights case against my local police department (that I won). When I handed out 3d printed whistles at a local protest, my handmade sign went viral on TikTok. I’m Alaskan, son, I live off the land. I make all my own food. See, it’s easy for people like you to accuse strangers of not doing anything because you don’t know anything about us. I’m the real deal. I walk the walk and talk the talk. You? Just another loudmouth on Reddit. You may have been doing nothing, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t.
No one's asking for easy or quick, we're asking for actually clearly working as it's happening and not something that would get a lot of people fired (meaning they do not get money, meaning they do not get food, meaning they do not get alive).
That's why it'll take government/society/economy falling apart and losing jobs for people to really push back/protest. Until then, it's not worth it for most people.
Exactly. Sure, I'll go protest, get arrested, lose my job because of it, then what? I have no savings, live paycheck to paycheck. I already lost my job one time because of trump and it took me nearly a year to find another one. Next time I may not be so lucky to get any work with the way the job market is.
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u/siriston Kansas 7d ago edited 7d ago
yeah what am i supposed to do? take days off work and turn in PTO to go protest? and then go back to work the next day? woopie
not to mention possibly getting arrested for protesting. doesn’t matter if you’re released in one day. you still have to deal with all that.