I don’t want to write a very long post, but I just wanted to remind everyone about this.

I recently learnt about protest on February 5th, and just wanted to spread this. The wiki page has a huge table of non-violent protests.

I know many people are disheartened, and in such circumstances, people often resort to violence (sometimes to send messages, sometimes in response to another violence, sometimes in catharsis).

I am from land of Gandhi, and a huge admirer of his work. Many people even in my country today feel Gandhi was useless or found him problematic for n number of reasons, some partially valid, many not, but this post is not about him. What I want to highlight is his idea of Satyagraha - it is essentially a exercise in (and for) truth. 2 famous non violent movements of his time being civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Names give the core ideas away - but essentially - break laws peacefully. To elaborate - 1 of them was against a salt tax law. They just made salt, and did not pay tax. It was both literal and symbolic, in the sense that they stopped paying taxes - and EIC were hit both financially and political power wise.

And these are not the only peacefully protests our land, one of the most recent ones was a farmers protest (for context, in India, majority people are still employed by farming), and roughly after a year of protest, they got there demands met.

I wanted to add a US specific example, and I can’t think of anything better than Stop War protests regarding Vietnam War.

TL;DR - Peaceful protests work, you just have to be persistent