r/Glasgow Tools

Of course there will be some commenters who are just racist or have shitty politics or whatever but I think even without a pandemic there are a lot of people who are maybe a bit cynical and view this type of thing as people bandwagoning on to a cause mostly so they can show off how woke they are to others and that kind of thing rather than any real connection to it or expectation of change. People who will have forgotten that black lives matter when it drops off the news cycle and will be putting a banner on their Facebook page (most often how their activism goes) for whatever the next cause of the moment is instead.

I understand finding these progressive poser types frustrating but outside of the pandemic I usually fall to the position of "even if they're supporting a good cause for selfish, temporary reasons they're still supporting a good cause so whatever" and of course while people like that will be among the crowds some act like it's everybody there which isn't going to be right either (what the real percentages are I have no idea and I imagine if you ask 3 different people to estimate you'd get 3 very different numbers). The pandemic does change things though and I think if you're already a bit cynical towards many of these people and their motivations now is the easiest time to view them all as fannies - if they are poser types it's usually just a harmless addition that boosts the numbers of the cause but now it's risking virus transmission on top of that. We might have links to America and we of course have our own racism issues but is our solidarity to their/that cause in this way in this moment really worth the risk to lives of kicking off the virus again? There's no simple yes/no answer to that question it's going to depend how significant you think this protest is likely to be compared to how significant you think the virus risks are but I see a lot of people trying to shut down those who complain - sometimes just by saying the cause is very important which is fair enough though you can argue supporting it this way during a pandemic still but sometimes suggesting anyone who criticises a mass gathering right now must be racist or think it's only an American problem or similar which is definitely too far for many people in these circumstances.

This happening in the middle of a pandemic complicates things - for those who would be dismissive of it regardless it's an easy thing for them to point to but there are definitely people who wouldn't normally be critical that are questioning it now primarily for the pandemic reason. I'm one of them and I struggle to really come down on a solid position because both of the main factors are full of unknowns (how likely is this event to increase virus transmission vs how likely is it to make any kind of meaningful difference to the good cause it's in support of)