A protest is obnoxious because being dirt poor in a wealthy country is obnoxious.
A protest is disruptive because billionaires are disruptive to every society.
A protest is goddamn loud because the clanging of empty pots will never ring louder than the hunger that cries out from empty bellies.
A protest is violent when the void of delayed justice is considered to be peace.
If you were an elected band council member of the Wet’suwet’en territory, would you let the oil and gas company encroach upon your ancestor’s lands, lands defined in spilled ink and spilled blood, so you can sustain the fraying clans that are alive and needful today? Or, if you were a hereditary clan chief, would you resist outright the insidious intrusion of surveyors and their company men presenting their Pandora’s box in a simple, auburn briefcase?
We can only imagine how such leaders shake their heads at night, aghast at the choices laid before them.
When noble leaders for noble causes are pitted one against another, a violent protest is born.
When there is no way out but oligarchy, gerontocracy, autocracy, monarchy, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, corporatocracy, theocracy, we say NO!
We will not be ruled by oligarchs, who plunder using the law; we won’t be ruled by old people, ignorant in their infinite wisdom; we won’t be ruled by autocrats and their goose-stepping quislings, or by monarchs and their divine, inbred families; we won’t be ruled by morons and idiots, or by thieves, banded together by their thieves’ honour; we won’t be ruled by corporations who worship Mammon, the god of wealth, or by theocrats, eternally washing the coagulated blood off of Mammon with their holy water.
When heavy metals rain, red rivers run, and hurricanes swell;
When antibiotics fail, anti-vaxxers prevail, and frogs go the way of bees;
When plastic rains, seed vaults sour, and the permafrost melts;
When fear feeds on drought and the seas thrash our cities;
We will eat the money, eat the money, green with envy, green, feverish and ravenous like hungry ghosts until our cheeks drool with machine oil, until our bellies distend and our throats tighten into straws so we roll the bills and insert them lengthwise, one at a time, hungry for more, forever more, swallowing serpentine cents upon cents until senseless.
Who among you can defend the defenseless?