When Government Knows Best
They Should Probably Listen to the Protesters
In American history, there have been moments when ordinary people looked at what their government was doing and said;
This is wrong.
They protested. They marched. They sat down. They refused to comply. And quite often, the government's response was not to listen, but to resist them.
During the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger simply because the law said she should. Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others marched, protested, were arrested, beaten, attacked with dogs and fire hoses, and sometimes killed while demanding rights that today we regard as fundamental.
The protesters were called agitators and troublemakers. Many Americans opposed them. Government officials fought them.
History's verdict is considerably clearer.
The segregationists were wrong. The civil rights protesters were right. The government should probably have listened to the protesters.
During the Vietnam War, students and millions of other Americans protested a war they increasingly believed was immoral, unnecessary, and unwinnable. The government defended the war, expanded it, and repeatedly assured Americans that progress was being made.
At Kent State University in 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters, killing four and wounding nine. Eleven days later, police killed two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi.
Decades later, few Americans would argue that sending more than two million Americans to Vietnam, losing more than 58,000 of them, and killing vastly greater numbers of Vietnamese produced an outcome remotely commensurate with the human cost.
The protesters had a point.
The government should probably have listened to the protesters.
Before the Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets, joining millions around the world who questioned the justification for invading Iraq. The government went ahead anyway.
The weapons of mass destruction that formed the central public justification for the invasion were never found. The war cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars. It destabilized Iraq, contributed to turmoil throughout the region, and helped create conditions in which ISIS could emerge.
Once again, protesters standing in the streets warning their government that it might be making a terrible mistake weren't necessarily naïve, unpatriotic, or uninformed.
Maybe the government should have listened to the protesters.
And now protesters are taking to the streets again.
This time they are protesting the tactics being used in immigration enforcement: masked federal agents, heavily armed operations, people being detained in public places, confrontations with citizens, and an expanding use of federal power that many Americans find deeply disturbing.
The government says these actions are necessary to enforce immigration law and protect its officers. Protesters say the methods being used are excessive, dangerous, and incompatible with the kind of country they believe America is supposed to be.
We don't yet have history's verdict.
And people are not automatically right simply because they are protesting. History contains plenty of angry crowds that were profoundly wrong.
But history teaches us something else as well.
Governments are remarkably good at convincing themselves that whatever they are doing at the moment is necessary. Officials defending segregation believed they were maintaining order. The architects of Vietnam believed they were containing communism. The architects of the Iraq War believed—or at least insisted—that invading Iraq was necessary for American security.
They were very certain.
That certainty didn't make them right.
So perhaps when large numbers of Americans become sufficiently disturbed by the exercise of government power that they leave their homes and take to the streets, the government's first question shouldn't be:
How do we stop them?
Perhaps it should be:
What are they trying to tell us?
Maybe today's protesters will ultimately be proven wrong.
Maybe today's government will be vindicated.
But considering our history, anyone wielding the power of the government might want to leave just a little room for another possibility.
The government should probably listen to the protesters.
— Steffen Patrick