You’ll only be scared before you go to the protest. Once you’re there you’ll be fine. The vibe on the ground at every protest I’ve been to is great and there’s a real feeling of camaraderie and support from your community. There is some risk, yes. It’s probably still safer than crossing the street.
My [sister/brother/other] in [insert deity] have you forgotten that in almost every place on the globe food is purchased with money? And that money is also how you buy politicians? One billionaire absolutely could solve hunger through a combination of direct donation and political spending.
Fear of retaliation by the physical human in front of you as well. Some people are good because they believe in the value of goodness but a lot of them only act right when they can’t get away with being awful.
Yeah, I think it’s a mistake to imagine that these are good people who just need a little love. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who aren’t getting enough love for proper human flourishing and it’s not like that turned them all into fascists. The kind of evil exhibited by these people must be attributed to a fundamental enjoyment of the suffering of others.
That’s how they get you, with a nugget of truth that in your context is reasonable and in theirs is explicitly unreasonable. The idea that one can’t choose peace if they have no choice is an old one and philosophers have been thinking about it for ages. There’s nothing wrong with the idea. What’s wrong is that in the context of the alt right they imagine themselves as John Rambo and use nonsense like this as wank material when they’re advocating for (or doing) violence. It’s a story they tell to infantilize and invalidate the left. If we’re all babies who couldn’t even choose violence if we wanted then they should make decisions for us, right? Including the decision to kill us.
Funny thing is that the left got most of the rights and protections that people of every stripe benefit from through outright violence. Strikes and protests and all that are the compromise, remember.
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that animals feel pain and are sentient like us, and despite the pop science articles to the contrary there is no scientific evidence that plants feel pain or have sentience at all. Plants respond to stimulus in very complicated ways, that’s what we have evidence for. Don’t pretend the two are equivalent. Stop getting your ideas from sensationalist pop science garbage and read the actual studies.