To those of us who live in the Bay Area, it's old hat by now - but to my family and friends in the Midwest, it's still baffling.
"Wait, so, these people went to protest the local transit cops shooting somebody, and ended up chanting about Palestine?"
Yep. And it's only getting worse. After last night, even some of us here are asking "What does GREECE have to do with it?"
It's a good question, and it strikes at the heart of modern liberalism: Why the hell can't radicals protest JUST ONE THING at a time?
The inability causes real damage to their issues (all of them): The anti-war movement never took off in much of the country precisely because many Americans (myself included), who would have been happy to march against the war per se, were not interested in marching about the war/Israel/racism/school reform/death penalty/free trade/Free Mumia!
We stayed home, and didn't try to hold our own rallies because we knew that those people would show up and accuse us of not being anti-war enough because we eat meat.
The radicals respond (though not in an organized fashion) that all of these issues are interrelated: That the systemic dynamics of oppression manifest in multiple ways and that it's this fundamental dynamic that must be opposed all at once - in Palestine, in Greece, in San Francisco, and everywhere else.
The result is the creation of what I've called the "liberal ur-issue," wherein everything we don't like is seen to be exactly equivalent of, or even identical to, everything else we don't like. It's all one thing.
I formulated the concept at an activist meeting where California's agriculture policies were compared to: The war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind, apartheid, global warming, and (of course) Nazi war atrocities.
It's true that there are large-scale system dynamics at work, but this attitude becomes a problem when you use it to turn people off of the fight for marriage equality just because they don't believe Proposition 8 is as bad as Hitler.
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