this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Look, it can totally seen how the protests give hope to others by showing them that "they're far from alone in their concerns" and doing so in a way which is independent of mainstream political parties (which is good, since in my experience when political parties capture protests, they use such movements for their own personal good, in the process weakening the original movement).
In fact I totally approve of the protests and (even though I'm not American) I'm happy with just how big they were because maybe American has enough good people to make it a better country in the World stage (plus, frankly, I have some American acquaintances from minorities and don't want to see them suffer).
What I fear is that people here in Lemmy are crazily over-celebrating the protest as some kind of ending in itself when it's at best a beginning, and not even the beginning of the end but the beginning of the beginning.
If these protests aren't leveraged to organize grassroots movements to start doing things like guerrilla (in the marketing sense, rather than violent sense) campaigns to oust the crooked politicians no matter what their party is and weaken the influence of Money in politics, they're worthless, same as the George Floyd protests ended up being worthless because they didn't led to any organized follow through to force politicians to restructure policing in America.
So my point is that people need to keep their eye on the long term solution for America's problems, and that doesn't stop with kicking Trump out, it requires a far deeper cleanup of the American political system and addressing the problems of common Americans so that another guy like Trump (or, more likely, worse) doesn't get eventually get in power after Trump is out.
Trump is not the disease, he's a symptom, so merely Trump out isn't going to cure it.
Denigrating the effort to date doesn't do anything to further your point. Instead it serves to quell support and push a negative outlook and view of protesting.
Offering support, encouragement and advocating for sustained effort would.
You mentioned the George Floyd protests and said, in relation to that, "merelly coming out and walking for a bit in your own time while holding a board up doesn’t seem to achieve anything" but that's not true.
During and immediately after George Floyd the protest effected a lot of change but then the protests stopped, complacency set in.
No, the cure is sustained effort. The problems in the US have been building and evolving for decades, if not longer, and they'll take at least that long to get a handle on.