Not sure why the response was surprising: one group was protesting police brutality, and the other was protesting the exact pandemic rules that the CDC (etc.) was pushing. It would be a bit weird for the CDC to say "hey, we need to keep businesses shut down and people should stay inside, but it's cool if you want to go out and protest that requirement, in direct violation of the requirement itself".
And sure, there's a political/optics component. Disapproving of protests against police brutality would have been an incredibly bad look, much worse than disapproving of protests against pandemic safety measures. That shouldn't require any kind of explanation or evoke any surprise.
Re:I Miss My Bar
by stolenmerch on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:12PM
(#26196034)
One group was violating the lockdowns out of a need to be heard concerning police brutality, the other group was violating lockdowns to preserve their livelihood because they can't work remotely. It wasn't just "hey we think this is dumb and we wanna go to Disneyland". This shouldn't evoke surprise either.
Sure and I don't want to minimize the suffering of people affected by COVID-19, either directly or economically. But there really is no comparison with the systemic violence and racism that Americans of color have experienced for 400 years.
Re:I Miss My Bar
by stolenmerch on Friday February 19, 2021 @01:01PM
(#26195894)
Ok, fair but it's not really a comparison. It's more a question of what is a threshold for acceptable violation of lockdown orders. It doesn't really matter if Reason X is N% worse than Reason Y. The scale of each protest fully explains the scale of the problem.
Totally, and I think it's wholly unreasonable to tell someone who's lost their income for months to just chill and stay inside. I think that's the correct advice, but I also think it's not gonna work. I fault our idiotic government for failing to help us when we needed it most. People were right to be infuriated, and I think this shows that when government fails--either to address systemic racism or to provide assistance in a pandemic--everything gets worse.
We shouldn't be faulting protestors or doctors here, we should be faulting our leaders.
The point is that there might be reasons why violating social distancing and lockdown mandates might be worth it. Protesting police brutality is one reason. Avoiding unemployment and accompanying mental health issues is another. One of these protests got the public approval of health care professionals and the other didn't. There was an entire movement called White Coats for Black Lives who endorsed the protests. Again, worth it. However, there's an entire class of folks who don't have options for remote pajama jobs. The protests against lockdowns was about avoiding the devastating effects to their lives.