Today’s Martin Luther King’s birthday (would have been his 90th) — a good time to reflect on perceptions of the sort of civil disobedience that he (and others) espoused. A columnist in the New York Times yesterday praised the efforts and results of the grass-roots progressive movement known as “the resistance” over the past two years, including its role in defending the Affordable Care Act and helping flip the House of Representatives. But the columnist believes that the current government shutdown, now in its fourth week, has shown the limits of the progressive movement. If this were happening in Europe, he argued, people would be “pouring into the streets” instead of lining up at soup kitchens or at pawn shops to sell their valuables. There are no big protests, no picket lines, no strikes.
Do people feel that it’s all useless? Or that their complaints in social media help? Or that everything’s going to be fine?