Ferguson, Missouri, offers a lesson for those of us who are trying to make life more fair: If you want the powers that be to pay attention, violent protest is more effective than nonviolence.
At this writing, race riots following the shooting of an unarmed young black man by a white cop in a suburb of St. Louis are dominating newspaper headlines and network news coverage. Federal and state officials have taken the rare step of chastising local police authorities, with the second-guessing going so far as to include a do-over of the autopsy of the 18-year-old victim, Michael Brown.
Violent demonstrators have the attention of the attorney general and the president of the United States, the latter of whom broke away from his vacation to call for both "respect for public order and the right to peaceful public protests." (After his administration's coordination of the brutal crackdown against the peaceful Occupy Wall Street movement, and his decision to shunt marchers at the 2008 and 2012 Democratic National Conventions into distant, hidden, caged "free speech zones," Obama's defense of the right to protest is a startling 180° turn.)