Images of gun-toting, angry white people storming the Michigan Capitol building to get their way (ABC News, 4/30/2020) have gotten me thinking this week about the utter chaos of living in a society that does not focus on equality. The idea of a protest becomes this grotesque distortion of carrying arms and shouting hate speech at people who were elected to carry out an informed reasoning process on behalf of every citizen. When the Mayor of Stillwater, Oklahoma issued a proclamation, in conjunction with allowing some businesses to re-open, requiring every customer as well as every employee wear to a mask, so many employees received threats from the general public that the proclamation was amended to require only the employees to wear masks.
The claims of angry white protesters always seem to revolve around an uninformed view of their constitutional rights. To understand the constitution only as tool that was created so that “I” can get “my” way – eat in a restaurant, shop at Walmart, pick up lawn care items at Home Depot – is a travesty in the first place. When and how will “I” ever be able to consider the rights of others in such a selfish society? How many of our own relatives and family members, including children, have to die before “we” would consider that perhaps “we” needed to consider behaving more responsibly?
The rights of citizens in a democracy are accompanied by some hefty responsibilities. One of those is to treat all other persons with dignity and respect. That cannot be achieved by carrying guns into a legislative chamber, or by bullying people on line, or by shouting hate speech at people. Those are the behaviors of the self-absorbed, not of members of a civilized society that values the rights of every citizen. In these times of a terrifying pandemic, to be unable to show respect for the health of others is barbaric. We don’t need some people living as if the coronavirus doesn’t exist or is not a threat. Already over 60,000 Americans have died from this disease, a number equivalent to the entire population of Coral Gables, FL, or Florissant, MO, or Cupertino, CA, or Dearborn Heights, MI, or Dubuque, IA. We need to know that legislators everywhere are working hard to understand all of the facts and to provide all of the resources we need for all of us to stay healthy and live the rest of our natural lives.
Another important responsibility of citizens in a democracy is to learn about the issues – to read reliable sources, to obtain information from a variety of well-researched media platforms, to bring our intelligence to bear on the positions we take. The only sensible way to live as a free person is to be informed. Instead, we are being forced to act in accordance with ignorance. Protesters cannot cite credible resources for their positions. They are feeding off of media and online sources that are designed to incite hatred, anger, and division. That is a terrible way to live, and a waste of intelligence and common sense.
We have duly elected public officials who are responsible for studying all of the available research, and for debating various 
ways of addressing critical social issues. The ignorance of the unhappy white people, delivered with shouts and guns and vitriol, too often steers policy away from what is the most important and best for all of us. As a result, politicians have a nearly impossible job of creating policies that treat us as equals.
There are reasons why one of the hallmarks of living in a democracy is the right to peaceful protest. Peaceful protests are a demonstration of a respectful process of disagreement. When policies are made by our elected officials, oftentimes compromises among varied points of view have shaped those policies. The outcome can leave some people feeling that their own views were minimized or not considered at all.
Those who feel overlooked by policies should protest, should get involved in government, should generate informative materials to promote their point of view or to get the truth out, should try to sway public opinion towards other courses of action that take overlooked needs into account. Peacefully. That is how change for the better happens in a democracy.
Right now we need every person of every color, religion, economic situation, and political persuasion to protest on behalf of blacks and Native Americans, who are dying from the coronavirus at a rate of over 30% of their populations (The Atlantic, 4/14/2020). The death rate among whites is around 13% (APM Research Lab, 5/1/2020). Rather than diverting legislative attention to the needs of a few white people whose only intention is to prove their superiority by being free to infect others at will so that they can do as they please, we should be working to help our researchers and legislators address the horrific death rates among blacks and Native Americans.
Living as superior asks too much of me, and I think it asks too much of everyone else in our society. We cannot cope with all of the resulting chaos, and we for sure do not want society to deteriorate into pockets of war zones fighting self-interested battles. Playing to the haters is creating more and more chaos. We all need to live in a peaceful world where we know that kindness and compassion are the rule, where policies are shaped based on research and factual information, where disagreements are handled respectfully, and where we address the needs of the forgotten.
