WASHINGTON, D.C.- Protesters converged on the Capitol today to call on Congress to extend the additional $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits beyond the July 31 deadline to provide the needed financial support for them to continue regular demonstrations aimed at the destruction of the entire rotten and corrupt system that lay at its very root.
“It is imperative that representatives and senators pass this crucial legislation,” said protester Janelle Van Nostrand, 24, of Kripplebush. “Without help from Congress, I’m afraid we might not be able to continue our efforts to overthrow it.”
Protesters point out that unlike the Bolsheviks of 1917 or the Chinese Communist Party of the late-40s, they have no central organized structure of professional revolutionaries supported by membership dues. That very disdain of hierarchy and lack of leadership has been touted as a source of resilience; it prevents a few elites from selling out the movement and frustrates efforts of agencies like the FBI to discredit the entire enterprise by digging up dirt on the people at the top. But it also means that there is no one to coordinate protests if the bulk of demonstrators need to return to their jobs. “That’s why it’s so important for the government to come through for us here,” said protester Michael Young, 28, of Wiltwyck. “Otherwise, this thing could fizzle out just as quickly as it began.”
Young, an unemployed bartender, said his former employer has asked him to come back part-time, and he regularly receives emails about job openings for jobs like Contact Tracer and Landscaper from the county unemployment office and his mother. “It’s not really that tempting because I’m making more now than I would at these jobs,” he said. “But if it doesn’t get extended, I guess I’ll have to look into it. Kind of depressing to think about.”
Van Nostrand, who formerly worked in retail, said she dreams of a summer night in the not-too-distant future when the combination of the heat, the pandemic, the generation of directionless, lonely individuals in the street yearning for a purpose, and the manifest inability of the existing decadent political structure to produce meaningful reform, will, like so much gasoline-soaked tinder, be set off by a spark — all it would take would be one more video of a deadly police encounter in a nation of over 300 million under constant surveillance — and the Capitol and White House themselves will burn in a cleansing fire, the guillotines will be raised and the streets from Pennsylvania Ave. to Broadway, Michigan Ave. to Sunset Blvd., will run red with the blood of racists, oligarchs and other imperialist swine. “It is at times like these when history stands on a precipice and the world holds its breath,” said Van Nostrand. “Will the forces of radical social justice, equality, love and anarchy, through a completely unprecedented and unexpected conflagration of factors, be propelled into the leadership of the greatest power the world has ever known, able to purge the globe of racism and transphobia at the barrel of the thermonuclear stockpile? Or will we all go back to work, deal with a few more months of social-distancing and masks, then get the vaccine and see everything return pretty much back to normal by early next year?”