The fix is not killing ICE officers.

The civil rights movements of the 60s, Jim Crow, etc, won by being willing to be beaten. By voluntarily entering a cafe and sitting there waiting to be served like a human being, meanwhile being willing to be called names, dropped food and drinks onto them, burnt with cigarettes, abused.

That willingness and perseverance in wanting to be recognised as the human beings they are awoke the rest of the population.

Pacifist demonstrations and matches are a way to achieve that. They are displays for your fellow colleagues, not for the government you want to depose. Make clear that they are pacifist. Prepare and inform the people going. Sit down if you are charged. Stop violent people there. Etc. Make obvious that the fascist are fascists that way and say and invigorate people to your side.

The first act that started the Tunisian “Arab Spring” was just one street seller being killed by the police.

There is no “correct” spark. And nobody knows what will spark a war until it has happened.

Maybe some guy that gets shot by ICE, maybe some guy that kills an ICE thug, maybe something else.

I agree with most everything you said here, it’s a good analysis. Sorry for being a bit of a reactionary this morning. Not sure why I was on such a shit-slinging vibe earlier but I’m willing to own up to it.

What does killing 1 ICE “officer” accomplish? How does that affect change in the right direction? Does this cause others to do the same and follow suit?

We need more that I don’t think we’re at the point of accomplishing yet. We need a full on civil war. One that I’m not sure how we get to kick off, all at the same time, all across the nation, without it fizzling out quickly.

I would see a civil war, or something like it, as the first “real,” and rational opportunity for an individual to kill an ICE agent. In my mind, doing so as a sort of lonewolf is so absurdly stupid as to not be considerable but I understand that’s probably not a reasonable take these days anymore when it comes to discourse in the commons. Therein is the sociopolitical paradox you mentioned about what actually sparks the powderkeg. In short, I think we’re saying about the same thing in principle, I’m just an edgelord before noon I guess lmao.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I always appreciate discourse. Meet all sorts of cool people on lemmy. Hope life has more in store for you, for all of us. Good luck!

The “every single American is culpable and therefore my bigotry is excused” energy is getting wild.

The state should not exist. We are people of Earth, and we should not be divided by someone. Divided, we are powerless to make a global change, and those who divide us reap all the benefits of this bullshit system.

That is only in theory, like the copcept of democracy

It does make sense though. The main motivator for politicians is power. That means, naturally political systems flow towards maximizing power for those in power, that’s just the natural progression.

To change this, major political upheavals are necessary, so basically events where the whole old leadership is tossed out and the new leadership can try to setup something to stop the same thing from happening again.

WW2 was perfect for that. All those countries were in need of a completely new political system and thus they could be built better from the ground up.

The US never had any event like that (apart maybe from the civil war).

To change the system without such an event, two thirds of all relevant politicians would have to vote for changing the system that brought them to power. Not likely to happen.

Have you looked at the amendments? So far there have only been 27 of them over 236 years. Ten of them were created within a year of the constitution being created. They were basically Zero-Day-Patches, not actual amendments, and two amendments only exist to nullify each other (18 and 21) which leaves 15 amendments over 235 years (one of which was actually also created within the first year and only ratified 200 years later).

The last time an amendment was proposed was 54 years ago and the last one ratified was 33 years ago.

Not counting the Zero-Day-Patches, not a lot of these amendments actually change anything fundamental. Notable ones are 12 (governs the election of VP), 13-15 and 19 (civil rights), 17 (election of senators), 22 (president’s term limit) and 25 (succession of the president).

Notably absent from the amendments is anything that changes the core political system or electoral system.

Compare that to other countries. In the time that the US constitution hat 15 minor amendments, France had a total of 15 complete constitution re-writes, not even counting amendments. 15 full new constitutions.

Germany had 69 constitutional amendments since 1949 (76 years, so almost one amendment per year, compared to the 1/16 amendments per year in the USA).

But by far the biggest issue is that a constitutional amendment cannot actually fix fundamental systemic issues. The people who have the power to change the constitution came to power within the current system, so if they fundamentally change how the system works (e.g. by repairing the electoral system in a way that more than two parties can be relevant), they are directly cutting into their own power, so of course they won’t do that.

That’s what you need major constitutional crises for (like e.g. Europe after WW2), so that the constitution can be re-written from scratch, fixing the issues that lead to the crisis.

But the US has been too big to fail for too long and thus there never was anything big enough to take down the US so that it needed to be restarted from scratch. The closest they came to was the civil war, but they didn’t take the opportunity to actually overhaul the system. Probably because it was still too early and there wasn’t much of a precedent of how to build a better democratic system.

But who knows, at the current rate it might be likely that the US is quite close to another chance to re-write the constitution.