...is one last "final straw" after years or even decades of oppression, like with Masha Amini being arrested, beaten and murdered for refusing to wear a hijab in Iran a few years ago. This went viral in a big way in our hyper-immediate social-media environment, and I'm sure you all remember the massive protests, demonstration and violence that followed. An inciting incident like that seems certain to happen here if "the wrong person" gets violently abused on film, and it also goes viral.
The flip side to that coin is that I think many/most of us now believe that the rapist felon is slavering at the bit for that very thing to happen so that he can invoke the Insurrection Act and REALLY show us his power and cruelty. Bring it, I say. Those bastards can't kill us all. And when enough people in the clueless middle and even disillusioned magats wake up and realize that our true enemy has ALWAYS been the billionaire class, not all the imaginary enemies Fox tells them to hate, there might be a historical inflection point. Whereas I predicted all last year that the election season would be the summer of '68 all over again, I have now revised that prediction to this summer. I dread it, but fear that may be what it takes. It always has taken that.
As someone descended proudly from working class people from the most remote mountains of Western North Carolina, when I was still teaching, I taught The Grapes of Wrath to my AP students like it was holy scripture; I even read the famous last speech by Tom in which he repeatedly assures his dear Ma, "I'll be there" at my mother's funeral. (Neither here nor there, but I would sometimes play them the three versions of "The Ghost of Tom Joad" (Guthrie, Springsteen and RATM as an exercise in analyzing tone in the vastly different interpretations)). That is really what that book is all about: the terrifying power of "just plain folk" when they band together in that realization. The broligarchy fears than more than anything else, and always has.
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