Blocking roads is inappropriate?

The issue as far as those in the movement Blacks Lives Matter are concerned is the disproportionate killing of African Americans at the hands of American police.  It's okay if others, or you, wish to think it's not true, but that is the motive that is spurring them on.  Probably for them knowing so many family and friends who've had bad - or deadly - encounters with police.

Or for that stuff where a person gets pulled over for a DWB - Driving While Black.  Or that whole thing where if any of them shoot a person, it's an automatic arrest and Grand Jury indictment, while if a policeman kills person - or person after person - he's given a paid vacation then re-instated.

But hey, if they have a complaint, why don't they protest appropriately?  What's with this blocking roads stuff?  That's just asking for trouble!  The police are then justified in attacking them the more, in full battle regalia, and with chemical weapons and sticks and shotguns and sonic weapons and armored vehicles!

Really?  This is over BLM not protesting "appropriately"?  I wonder, what would an "appropriate" protest look like?

I suspect I know. 

That would be where they meet quietly in their homes, drink some fruit juice, tell each other how bad it is, and go home.  Or maybe apply for a permit to march, and at a time and place chose by the very leaders they disagree with, then walk quietly down that street, without disturbing any peace at all.  Or, wait, how about if they just meet in a "free speech zone" on the nowhere side of town and stand around for a bit before going home?

Yes, I'm sure all those would be regarded as wonderfully "appropriate" protests.

And also completely ineffectual in getting any kind of public attention to this or any other issue!  Which, in case any forgot, is kind of the point of a protest!

It is a hilariously sad commentary on our times that those who would be the first to claim that they'd have marched with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are the first to cry out in anger over African Americans taking to the streets now.

It's "I'd harbor fugitive slaves in the 19th century!" and "I'd hide Ann Frank in the 20th century!" but never a doing of anything now in the 21st century.  When it would matter.  I guess we'll have to take the person's word on how brave they'd be 75 or 150 years ago.

Protests MUST generate a response.  They MUST draw attention.  And so for that, they must be inconvenient.  They must cause a bit of trouble.

Appropriately?  Of course they should be done "appropriately".  Which to me only means that no innocents are harmed in it, nor property destroyed.  But people inconvenienced?  Delayed?  Made to give attention to a segment of the populace that seems disenfranchised?

There is NOTHING more appropriate than that!

We live in a nation where a group of wealthy white ranchers could - while armed - take over buildings on Federal lands.  And the same people upset with BLM were outraged that any of them might die in the removal of them.

Support those ranchers and their right to protest by seizing property if you must - though I find it a bit extreme.  But do not then support them, but turn around and post memes about how those driving down a blocked road should "run over" the BLM protestors.  For the "crime" of delaying them or making them take another route.

Pictured:  An "inappropriate" protest in 1770.  And as will be usual, the black guy is killed first!