It used to be an eye for an eye.
These days, somebody takes your eye, and you march ten streets over and take a complete stranger’s leg.
The man was just going about his day. He doesn’t know you. He has no idea what happened to you. He wasn’t even aware there was a conflict.
And mind you, the person who snatched your eye in the first place is still standing there with both eyes intact.
You had one job.
ONE job.
Find the person who took your eye.
How on earth did you come back with somebody else’s leg?
And the most absurd part is that people will applaud this as some great act of resistance.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that the best way to punish the people responsible for our suffering was to make entirely different people suffer.
Some of the most effective protest movements understood the power of withholding their participation.
Workers stopped working. Consumers stopped spending. People marched, organized boycotts, and refused to continue feeding the very systems they were challenging.
The factory owner couldn’t make money without workers. The business couldn’t collect revenue from customers who refused to buy. The people who benefited from the arrangement had a financial reason to pay attention.
Of course, those protests weren’t always peaceful, and innocent people sometimes felt the consequences. But there was often a clear relationship between the grievance, the target, and the pressure being applied.
Now imagine being furious with the government over the rising cost of living and deciding to burn down the florist shop on the corner.
The florist.
The woman who sells roses for Valentine’s Day and sympathy arrangements for funerals.
She’s probably struggling with the same rising costs you are. Her electricity bill went up too. So did her rent, her groceries, and the price of the flowers she needs to keep her business running.
But congratulations. You’ve burned her livelihood to the ground.
That’ll teach the government.
Somewhere, a politician is having dinner, blissfully unaware that Mrs. Johnson no longer has a flower shop.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Johnson is standing outside, wondering how she’s going to pay her bills next month.
And someone is celebrating the destruction as evidence that the people have finally had enough.
As though Mrs. Johnson wasn’t one of the people.
What a victory.
A truck driver cannot afford the rising cost of fuel. His frustration is understandable. His livelihood is being squeezed by circumstances largely beyond his control. So he joins a blockade, preventing food from reaching supermarkets.
The food sits. Some of it spoils. Shelves begin to empty.
Meanwhile, a mother who had nothing to do with fuel prices walks into a supermarket and finds that she cannot buy what her children need.
That’ll teach them.
Teach whom, exactly
The mother? The children? The farmer watching his produce rot? The supermarket employee whose hours may now be cut because there is nothing left to sell?
The people making the decisions still have full refrigerators. They may eventually respond to the pressure, but until then, the hardship falls on people who were already struggling alongside the protesters.
I understand that protest is supposed to create pressure. I understand that people in power often need more than polite requests before they are willing to act.
But surely the direction of that pressure matters.
At what point does the suffering of innocent people become an acceptable bargaining chip?
Of course, the damage looks different depending on where you’re standing.
From the protester’s position, it’s pressure.
From the politician’s position, it’s disruption.
From the perspective of the man ten streets over, it’s Tuesday, and now he has no leg.
He has lost something he may never recover, and he doesn’t even know whose grievance he’s been recruited to represent.
It is deeply unsettling how easily we can recognize injustice when it happens to us and overlook it when we are the ones distributing it.
We want those responsible to be held accountable. We want consequences. We want the people causing the harm to experience enough discomfort that they are compelled to do something about it.
But the closer those people are to power, the harder they often are to reach.
So the anger travels.
It moves down the street, through the neighborhood, into someone’s livelihood, someone’s kitchen, someone’s ability to get through another ordinary day.
Each person passes along a little more pain than they received, hoping that eventually enough of it will reach the intended destination.
But hear me: breaking a window is easy. Burning a building is easy. Making life miserable for someone with fewer resources than you may be the easiest thing of all.
The difficult part is confronting the people and institutions that actually have the power to change the circumstances you’re protesting.
That requires organization, discipline, strategy, and a willingness to distinguish between the people who caused the problem and the people who are simply trying to survive it.
Otherwise, what exactly have we accomplished?
The politician still has his position.
The wealthy investor still has his investments.
The person who created the grievance may still have every advantage he had before.
The florist has no shop.
The mother has no groceries.
And the poor fellow from ten streets over is learning how to get around with one leg.
Meanwhile, the man who stole your eye is standing right where you left him.
Watching the whole thing with both eyes.
You had ONE job.
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From a little too human (The Human Series, Book 3) by Serenite Hope.
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