The right to riot ✊

The other day I was looking at Facebook and one of my more conservative friends from High School posted about the riots in Minnesota after the killing of a black man in police custody.

The pictures told a similar story – windows broken in buildings and police cars, buildings looted, brick spray painted, glass shattered, debris burned. Premature destruction of the products of planned obsolescence for purposes of expression of anger and creation of awareness of the suffering of these communities.

Both America and Europe have a long history of riots, semi violent protests where property is destroyed as an angry expression of fears and desires of the masses. A form of expression of raw human emotion, an out burst that captures the world’s attention.

I used to think rioting was truly evil. But I’ve come to a new way of looking at it in our disposable society where nearly everything has a set lifespan. Buildings and their interiors are intended to discarded every few decades, automobiles every few years and most other things every few days or weeks. Rioting only just speeds up the destruction in a targeted fashion.

Victims of rioting do have a financial cost. Prematurely destroyed property has to be repaired and replaced. But often property that is destroyed in riots is insured and when its not, it’s a loss that can be written off. Most things destroyed by rioters are owned by large institutions and cost of restoration and rebuilding is small compared to the rest of the institutional budget.

Rioting isn’t always fair though. Sometimes small businesses and homeowners are victims with few resources to rebuild and a disproportionately high personal financial cost to them personally. Sometimes people do get injured or killsx in riots, either from the police response or fire. Communities subject to riots often struggle to move on as businesses and homeowners move away to safer ground.

It’s not to celebrate rioting or to embrace violence. But these protests are an expression and response by struggling and oppressed communities as they try to heard, through dramatic actions and the premature destruction of the products of planned obsolescence.