Violent Protests

By Afrah Ahmed

Violent protest is the opposite of calm protest. Violent protests take an aggressive approach to a problem in hopes of social change. Peaceful protests take a calm approach to the problem in a nonviolent way in hopes of change. You can easily tell the difference between the 2. At first, when you think about it, it seems like violent protests aren't that great, but if you think about the changes that have been made after the violent protests started, you can’t deny that they have worked. Violent protests are aggressive and destructive, but they’re effective.

Is violent protesting the right way to protest for change? 

Everyone knows the quote, “Violence is never the answer.” We’ve all heard it before. If you ask MLK if violent protests are the right way to protest for change he’d say no and I somewhat agree. Violent protesting is a way to protest but it isn’t the best way nor the right way to protest. It’s fighting fire with fire which causes a bigger fire and that’s not a great outcome. Even if we do get what we want, in the end, people might find other things to go against like our generation, immigration, religions, etc... 

There are many problems in the world, do we really think we can use violent protest for everything? 

The answer is no and the more violent we are the more violent government organizations can be as well. In America, there are certain limits but in some other parts of the world, there are none, which can cause a lot of deaths and chaos. In America, there are already violent organizations if you think about the police and the many schemes that we might not know about. If we use violence for everything then we’ll just fuel the problem rather than end it. Violent protests also cause many deaths which is definitely not a good thing and people tend to carry guns during these protests which is also not a good thing. The way I see it is like we’re using violence to stop others from using violence which is very hypocritical on our part. 

What is the problem? 

I understand that people are getting tired of the injustice and that they’ve had enough. I understand how people are feeling and they’re desperate for a change, but people have to understand that if they turn to violence we might just be influencing other people and communities to think of violence as a solution. But even through all this, we can’t look through the fact that violent protests actually caused some change. But we also can’t look through the fact that violence shouldn’t be thought of as a solution to our problems. If we thought like that, society would crumble to the ground.