I like this term “crybullies”, and I wanted to talk a little about this whole thing.
Some part of us seeks out difficulty and conflict. I think it is the part that sees and feels the transience and precariousness of our “self”. There is nothing out there. It is a nothing filled with something, but it does not feel that way. It feels like fear. It feels like darkness.
And how to fight it? Build campfires. Build a tribe around the campfire. Build a fight for that tribe to wage so that all the energies latent within them come to the fore, so that they feel powerful, complete, not just as individuals, but as individuals within a larger “self”, a larger organism, something which breathes and exists outside of them.
In the past, mere existence was struggle enough. A family was not just a social unit, but a necessary economic unit.
As we have succeeded, the struggle to survive has diminished to near nothing, compared to the past. By and large, the United States has very few working poor with dirt floors, who lack indoor plumbing and electricity, who cannot get access to books and computers. All of these things make our poor relatively elite compared both to much of the world, and to human history.
So where do you find a struggle? You invent one.
I might say that the quality of people is in the quality of their struggles, what they choose to fight against, and for. By that standard, most of the children in our universities are extraordinarily mediocre, and those leading them, even more so. They are overgrown children, fighting battles which do not need to be fought, on behalf of people they belittle and infantilize in the process of presuming to speak for them, when they should be speaking for themselves.
Is DeShaun–a high school drop out, son of a woman who got pregnant at 19 and whose father abandoned him, and seemingly sentenced to working for close to minimum wage at shit jobs for life–helped by these protests? Does the crime in his neighborhood diminish? Do all his emotional scars disappear? Is he truly empowered in any way to go back to school, get his GED, go to college, get his degree, and set off for a middle class life?
Or is it stupid white people doing stupid white people shit? I’m going to go with number 2: stupid shit.