Peaceful Protest A Lost Art?

As Americans, we believe in the right of peaceful protest -- that we can have our say against something we believe to be wrong. We can criticize our politicians or our government without the expectation we will be thrown in jail. We might not even support what someone is protesting, but we defend their right to protest.

When actions advance beyond peaceful comment, though, they either embolden others to perpetrate similar actions or give protesters pause over the outlier actions that did occur.

The most recent example is Ferguson, Mo. -- again -- where two police officers -- neither members of the town's force -- were seriously injured early Thursday morning amid protests following the resignation of the town's police chief.

Police were present only to make sure the protests remained peaceful, but two were ambushed from a hill about 220 yards from the police station, according to witnesses.

Since six employees of the town have resigned following a Justice Department report that found racial bias in the police department, it's difficult to understand what's left to protest. But the protests had been quiet until the gunfire.

Locally, vandals who apparently didn't like a recent vote by state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, graffitied a downtown building where he has an office as a financial adviser with Morgan Stanley.

Many of the chalk graffiti slogans were directed at the state senator, who was one of six Republicans to vote down Gov. Bill Haslam's Insure Tennessee proposal in a special committee last month.

The building, though, is not owned by Gardenhire but by GenTech Construction LLC and the Maclellan Foundation.

Earlier the senator had been named in protests -- including a staged funeral procession -- over his vote by the Mercy Junction-operated Justice and Peace Center of Chattanooga, but nothing immediately linked the two events.

In Ferguson, Thursday's episode threatens to again escalate tensions that originally erupted after the shooting of a black man by a white officer last summer. During the first day of protests that followed that incident, at least 12 businesses were looted or vandalized, vehicles were damaged and a convenience store/gas station was set on fire. Two police officers received minor injuries.

Protests continued with less ferocity in September and October, with bottles and rocks thrown at police and once delaying a concert by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, but ramped up again in November when a grand jury determined there was not evidence to indict the policeman in the original shooting. Buildings were burned, shops looted, cars destroyed and guns discharged. Additional protests over the grand jury decision occurred in other U.S. cities and internationally.

When a grand jury in New York failed to indict another white officer in the shooting of a black man, Eric Garner, in Staten Island, protests similar to the ones in the Ferguson case followed. And, two weeks after the incident, two New York City police officers were ambushed and shot to death by a gunman who later turned the weapon on himself. The suspected gunman, on an Instagram account, had declared his intentions to kill police officers in retaliation for the deaths of Michael Brown and Garner.

In an ironic twist, the officer involved in the Ferguson shooting, in whose name so much outrageous violence was done, was cleared by a United States Justice Department that many were counting on to indict him. That investigation and three autopsies verified his story.

So, more than half a year after the deaths of the two black men, two policemen are dead, two policemen seriously injured and at least two slightly injured. The monetary toll of the looting, vandalism and wanton destruction of property by protesters has yet to be counted.

The Old Testament "eye for an eye" concept, thus, has been more than fulfilled. But that must cease being the way we protest in the United States. If we're ever to step into the post-racial era that the election of President Barack Obama was supposed to usher in, our protests cannot continue to be like the violence we so abhor in the Middle East. Our protests must be purposeful and powerful -- and peaceful.

No less than our standing as a nation is at risk, as Abraham Lincoln observed in an 1862 message to Congress.

"We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth," he wrote. "Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

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