Stunning police brutality will ignite a student anti-war movement in America
There's a chilling pattern between state violence and movement participation.
For example, Indigenous activists have organized for environmental issues for decades,
but the general public only became aware of what was going down in Standing Rock after Democracy Now shared footage of protesters being attacked by officers with guard dogs and pepper spray.
That catalyzed several hundred solidarity protests across the US and Canada under the name #NoDAPL.
The civil rights movement’s lunch counter sit-ins, Bloody Sunday in Selma and the freedom rides, culminated in media coverage of police violence.
Even the spread of the Occupy movement was inspired by state violence against protesters in Tahrir Square.
💥Media mobilizes movements,💥
👉so coverage of police repression of peaceful protest is often met with more protests.
At times, the protest itself may morph to become focused on the immediate issue at hand:
the state’s use of violence as a means to punish without due process and deter future activism.
For today’s anti-war protesters, they have all the infrastructure they need to broadcast a narrative about their beliefs directly to a global village.
Individually, they’ve been practicing for this moment for years by becoming accustomed to using their phones as political tools.
While the Occupy movement and advances in technology inspired new journalists to publish lots of raw and unfiltered content in 2011,
generation Z was born in it and are more digitally savvy than any group before.
In many respects, the youth of today have a ready-made infrastructure to shift control and buckle institutions,
but the key will be for students to sustain the pressure to ensure they meet their goals.
