More protest stuff
There has been near-uniform praise for how the police handled themselves where I moved to: Nashville, TN. Both from the broader community as well on our sub, /r/nashville.
The big day everywhere, Saturday, saw protests here as well. A police cruiser got beat up. Some of the touristy places downtown got their windows broken and some cheap stuff stolen. I'm not saying that's good, but the police did not escalate with that.
It took some dipshit white dude to instigate trying to turn down the courthouse. Yes, the police used tear gas to disperse that so they could deal with the problem of the courthouse being set on fire. It worked to get people away from a burning structure. (Honestly, in my opinion, is the proper time to use an area-denial weapon like that)
Beyond that first night, it's basically been peaceful the entire time.
I grew up in the north. Spent the first big chunk of my life (38 years) in Cleveland, Ohio. Then spent seven years in Seattle.
The entire time I had always been told how shitty literally everything down south was.
I’m not going to say that everything south of the Mason-Dixon Line is all rainbows and unicorns. There was a fuck-ton that has gone down here. Like I’ve eaten at the Woolworth in Nashville where the protests took place in the 60s for instance.
I think the big thing that has happened is that a lot of people have been forced to confront that head-on. You still have racists down here like everywhere else. But I think things are more to front-of-mind when dealing with people here.
Places I’ve lived in in the north were different. The segregation was way more than here in Nashville. You had a lot more racism that’s just beneath the surface than I’m seeing here.
I dunno. I guess it’s just me reflecting on this. There’s so much disdain for southerners up north that it was weird moving out here. And it just seems that so much of it didn’t seem to play out the way people said it would. It makes me question a lot of the “conventional wisdom” that I’ve heard all my life.