Ray Dillinger bear at sonic.net
Sun Jul 22 12:37:33 PDT 2001




On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, Sandy Sandfort wrote:

>It should be obvious that these riots are not so much ideologically
>motivated (though that's the pseudo-rational), but testosterone motivated.
>Most of these monkeys couldn't spell anarchy let alone understand it
>philosophically.  Let's not confuse the cover story with the real
>motive--fucking stuff up for the fun of it.


Hmmm.  I was digging after this for a while, trying to figure out 
why these people were rioting.  As you note, there's no real 
coherent message from the protesters, not even a thread of unifying 
platform or goals. 

But then, the information content of what comes out of the mouth of 
someone who's just hit his/her thumb with a hammer is pretty low, too. 
It doesn't mean s/he doesn't have a real concern. 

This is just a guess, but what *I* think motivates these people is 
frustration and disenfranchisement.  It's not that any substantial 
group of them want any particular thing, it's just that the whole 
bunch of them feel that they don't have a voice in what's happening 
any more.  The "globalization" people are consulting *each other* 
instead of the people affected by the laws to figure out what laws 
they should pass, and the people are pissed off because they don't 
feel that they have any input into the process.  

Also, the personal pressure on them is a little higher every year 
as the forces of capitalism get more ruthless and efficient at 
exploiting them as a market and as cheap labor - and the barriers 
to actually starting a business of one's own seem to be going nowhere 
but up - so they're also frustrated by the fact that even though 
they may be making more money, they're still working for other 
people and at the end of the day they're still poorer.  Capitalism 
from the worker's perspective means working longer hours, getting 
paid more, and winding up under family pressure (because your family 
is an intensely and effectively targeted market) to spend it all on 
stupid stuff.  Furbys, TV's, and barbie dolls, for god's sake. So 
at the end of the day they have more stupid crap but they're poorer 
and more tired and have less time to spend with their family - and 
after a while they get frustrated. 

But none, or few, of them see it in exactly those terms. They're 
just angry and frustrated and they don't really know why.  The 
few issues they believe in are getting ignored, so they go protest 
about those few issues and it turns into a chaotic mess because 
everybody has different issues and different degrees of how pissed-
off they really are.  More frustration.

				Bear






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