Protests, I've seen a few

It's seldom just "a protest," it's many different things to different people at different times.

Protests—and I’ve covered quite a few—are like the proverbial elephant.

That is to say, they look like many different things depending on where you’re looking. And, anyone who insists on one truth of a protest is as wrong as the blind sage who grasps the elephant tail and declares that the creature is very much like a snake.

I like protests. I’ve seen lone radicals pontificating to nobody in “protest cages,” at a judicially-authorized distance from a political convention site; merchandise-moving Tea Party events; and the massive, chaotic 2004 New York City protests, during which I was nearly arrested while standing outside a Swatch store, taking notes. America is an incomprehensibly vast place, populated by a wildly heterogeneous mass of millions, all of whom have the right to peaceably assemble, speak freely, and air their grievances. This is not a nation where one must suffer in silence, and that’s a good thing.

The protests currently causing national headlines the past several days is centered roughly ten miles south of where I currently reside. From what I can tell, participants have been peaceful; participants have been violent; law enforcement has acted terribly; law enforcement has shown admirable restraint; actions of federal officials have escalated problems; federal forces have been necessary in response to the situation; goals of the protests have been clear; messaging has been badly muddled; optics are likely to win support for the protesters’ cause; optics have worked powerfully against winning American sympathies. All of these and more have seemed true at one point or another, if you look in the right place at the right time. All have been false at other times, from other angles.

Even in well organized protests, there is rarely one uniform view of the purpose or plan. Ask participants the point of the protest, and you’re likely to get several different answers, from the official line from organizers to simple cathartic expression of hopeless frustration or anger. (A similar variance of purpose can often be found on the side of authorities.)

And if successful at drawing attention to a cause or complaint—as the Los Angeles protests have been –that attention tends to draw in more people, often with less connection to the “official” protesters. A successful protest can quickly become something more pluralistic that “a protest.” From opportunistic looters to folks line dancing while shouting “Fuck ICE,” and from SEIU members to local gawkers curious to watch a car burning, who counts as part of “the protest” and who doesn’t?

That question was impossible to answer cleanly, as the LA situation went from a mere handful of arrests on Saturday to dozens on Sunday. Certainly part of that change was the LAPD course-correction of deploying officers, and ultimately declaring the whole downtown area an unlawful assembly. Just as surely, those actions were precipitated by a realization that more, angrier, less self-disciplined agitators were entering the picture—a development in turn due in part to Trump calling up the National Guard. Arrows of cause and effect can get jumbled, tangled, and re-directed.

It has become standard, here locally, to note that the vast majority of Los Angeles carries on unaffected by what seems to be the biggest news event in the country. That in itself doesn’t necessarily prove much: I happened to randomly find myself in Seattle, on an unrelated assignment, during the 1999 WTO protests and never crossed paths with the action. Events can be big while small, if you see my meaning, and vice versa as well.

The protests did seem on the small side, though, in the vast context of the city. The population of Los Angeles, at 3.8 million, is almost exactly the same as the total U.S. population in 1789 when this country first took the wildly ambitious leap of faith that included those rights I referenced above. And that’s just the city; another 6 million or so live (as I do) elsewhere in LA county, including some 53,000 in the city of Paramount, site of a now-infamous Home Depot. The metro area population is close to 20 million. The city itself is spread out over a massive 468 square miles of land mass, the equivalent of almost 10 Bustons. It is an absurdity to infer, as many have, that the city is burning based on a few car fires on Alameda Street.

By the same token, the protests do not seem to have the size and scope that suggest a city rising up against federal deportation policies. Estimates have been tough to obtain—see my point above about who is and isn’t a protester—but seem to max out in the low four digits. They might very well reflect a much broader range of quiet support, but given the city’s population I’m hard pressed thus far to see this as a major uprising.

Nor, obviously, does it suggest an “invasion” necessitating the invocation of special emergency powers for the President.

As I write, the city has imposed an 8:00pm curfew, a significant inconvenience (this evening’s LA Philharmonic performance has been cancelled) that one hopes will dissuade the looting and vandalism that tool place after dark the day before. Maintaining law and order while allowing legitimate expression does become complicated when protests grow more pluralistic; I can appreciate this reality while also attesting to how frequently law enforcement errs in straddling that line. Like I said, I’ve covered quite a number of them.

Anyway, I like protests. In all their messiness.