The strike was nonsense anyway. Why were drivers striking -- punishing the innocent residents and visitors (and protestors/allies!) of New York (a sanctuary city!), in an attempt to punish Donald Trump?
Sure, one thing you can do is disrupt the specific people doing something bad. But that's pretty rare. As MLK explains, the point is to create a more general disruption so that everyone has to take notice of an issue they might otherwise ignore:
"Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."
From his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
The whole thing is worth reading. In particular, this bit always wakes me up: "I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a'"more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."
It would be like MLK advocating for equal rights protests in a majority-black church.
NYC residents being hazily "on their side" in a broad political struggle is distinct from actively doing something to oppose the EO. Again, read the Letter.
And no, it wouldn't. Although that is something that he did quite a bit of, given that he got his start as a Baptist preacher, so I'm not sure your analogy works.
He disagrees with the white moderate proclaiming "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action." You are committing that error.
No I am not. I am fine with disruptive protests, but they should be disrupting the people who need their minds changed. What is so difficult to understand about the fact that we are talking about protesting in the wrong place entirely?
The analogy is MLK protesting in an all-black church to prevent the constituents from hearing a sermon from a civil rights activist.
This has nothing to do with "inconvenient" protests so much as idiotic protests disrupting the very choir to which they are preaching.
No. You continue to fail to understand MLK's theory of protest. If you have read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, you give no sign of it.
If the people being disrupted are already active in a movement to change things, they will not mind the protest. But if they are merely people who say "I agree with you in the goal you seek" without active support, then they are the very moderates that MLK was addressing here: "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate [...]".
But racial injustice isn't just a side effect. It is quite often the point. If you read Loewen's Sundown Towns, you can see that quite often white people just don't like to see black people doing well, especially doing better than themselves. You can see the same thing echoed in Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Lands", although people have mainly learned not to say it out loud.
You're playing with words to fit a narrative, which doesn't match reality. At the same time, the Trump tropes are not about invasion of another country, so now you're being disingenuous just to argue. Good luck with that.
I'll continue to assert most of the outrage is misdirected.
The problem with this approach is that unless you do it in a way that's relevant to the original issue, you're just dragging innocent people into your fight and victimizing them. Depending on how much of an asshat you are to them (like, say, stranding them for several hours at an airport when they've just got off a flight), there's a good chance you'll push them to be less sympathetic to your cause.
Yes - some people might be less sympathetic, those are not the people the protest set out to influence. It's the people who haven't made up their minds yet, the people who think that "This will all blow over soon" and want to get on with their lives in their bubble. They NEED to be inconvenienced to react, to make up their mind that this is something they can't ignore. Only then when you engage the apathetic can the protest grow, and protests must grow otherwise most of them fizzle.
I think that protestors should be careful about their tactics, but I don't think they should have to invent ways to tie a protest's theme to its objective. We protest when our moral values are offended, and that's enough of a reason.
But let's run with your notion. Suppose there is somebody who says: "I guess I didn't know about the civil rights violations and the deaths that this policy will result in. And I guess it's terrible that these refugees have been waiting years in limbo trying to rebuild their lives. But what's really important is that I expected to be home on time for dinner, so now I won't help them."
I don't think a person like that was every going to be sympathetic to the cause. They weren't going to do anything. They were going to ignore it.
And that's exactly the point of MLK's style of protest. It is to make a problem for some into a problem for all. It is to make it impossible for comfortable people to keep ignoring the problem.
So the solution is to harm more? That's not a peaceful protest, that's terrorism.
Raise awareness. Be loud. Be visible. But if you base your protest around screwing up someone else's day the response you get will more likely be "hey maybe you deserved it" than "wow we should help these people."
If you think you know a better way to lead protests, by all means show us how. But I have no time for armchair experts whose only contribution is "u r doin it rong bcuz I dont lik it".
The people who would say, "maybe those refugees deserved it" because something was mildly inconvenient for them were never, ever going to stir themselves to do the compassionate thing. Ditto the people who value a sliver of comfort over helping legal residents arbitrarily ejected from their homes.
Your claims here are those of the white moderates that MLK called the greatest stumbling block to black freedom. Apparently you haven't yet bothered to read his "Letter From A Birmingham Jail". But I'm done trying to spoon-feed it to you, so if you'd like to pursue this further, take it up with him.
People will always protest against things that are more immediately visible to them than things they read about in infrequent news articles. That's just human nature.
You don't have to protest every cause to protest any cause. You can even protest things that, taken together, demonstrate you hold ideologically inconsistent views, if you want. That's on you.
That doesn't help your argument. They were aware Obama killed a quarter of a million people and did nothing. Meanwhile Trump inconveniences some travelers and somehow he's the monster worth protesting. Get real.
I'll thank you to reconsider your projections of people you've never met.
This in a nutshell is why things will get worse stateside. There will be those who write off the circumstances behind where we find ourselves today as human nature (an absolution of sorts, a moral line item to be paid when the circumstances are brought to their attention, not too dissimilar from the likes of HSBC et al when they pay penance in the form of monetary notes for aiding and abetting criminals as defined by a given state) and join the protest, and there will be those who apply the tools refined during war agaisnt their "own" at such protests.
Either way, only those who come out ahead outside of any virtue signaling will probably be the suppliers of such tools.
The drivers sacrificed their income to make a public statement.