Gen Z on has a relatively unseen element, of subconsciously seeing their agency being further and further abused, as the Tech Bros and Fossil Fuels Oligarchy swing the pendulum of value exchange, more and more in the abusers' favor.

Combine this with more viral social media stimulii, and you have a recipe for resistance at levels that... well, it's still difficult to measure this pushback at the level of the 1%, going to .01% - since it's such a rarity in human history. These abusive 'elites' literally have luxury bunkers they can retreat to, come too much of a monumental resistance.

Add in the level of wealth and Hollywood level script writing, that the current US Admin brings with it, and it gets even more difficult to see a 'way back'.

Sux big time.

Not to be confused with the necessity of having accountability for (the significant number of) cops who are straight up antisocial abusers and grifters. Just trying to say that "being a cop", absent specific offenses, shouldn't be a totally disqualifying bit of history.

How many cops there are who aren't antisocial abusers and grfiters is a whole other question, and probably one with an unsurprisingly low answer.

I find it extremely difficult to judge people raised in a neofascist culture, in a society that basically murders the poor as policy, for doing anything to get work and protect themselves from those outcomes.

Once those conditions are eliminated, we can harshly judge people who choose immoral and unethical ways of participating in the economy and interacting with society. Until then, balancing our judgement with an understanding of relative social agency is important.

Now we call it terrorism!

Indeed. Our headlines ought not to read “protests turn violent” but instead “protests subjected to police violence”

Cops are organized crime, not workers.

The way to prevent this from happening is for the state to decline to deploy them against protests, which are—in virtually every case—at least formally legal, a right that allegedly belongs to the public. But the state tattles on itself, deploying cops to crush protests with violence and then crying false tears about violence against its poor police and its poor property.

Sometimes, when people are attacked by agents of the state, protesters defend themselves. They might throw stones, or kick tear gas canisters back at the cops, or shoot fireworks. They might even cobble together incendiaries like Molotov cocktails.

The violence belongs to the state and its suppression of protests, not the actual protest.