An employee of the City of New Orleans begins erasing the “Black Power” slogan from the monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Thursday, Nov. 10, following protests over the election of Donald J. Trump. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
Owen Courrèges
It’s probably an understatement to say that the results of last Tuesday’s presidential election were a shock to many. I personally stayed out on election night and was treated to many dejected laments. Some drowned their sorrows, while others engaged in angry diatribes.
Here in Uptown, Donald Trump only won a few precincts around State Street and St. Charles Avenue. The wider New Orleans metropolitan area was divided. Elsewhere, in the sea of red that surrounds New Orleans, Trump won by a whopping 20 points.
Despite the divisiveness, life has proceeded much as before. For the vast majority, any problems people had with the election results were expressed in a civil manner, or at least a legal one. Alas, this was not universally the case.
On Wednesday, the day after the election, a gaggle of protesters gathered at Lee Circle in reaction to Trump’s election. However, many of these were not peaceful demonstrators, but violent malcontents looking to exploit any opportunity for destruction.
First, the protesters sprayed graffiti all over the base of the Lee Monument. The slogans were not particularly creative and, presumably, will not be appearing on t-shirts anytime soon. They ranged from “DIE WHITES DIE,” to “F*** TRUMP,” “BLACK POWER,” and “NO TRUMP, NO KKK.”
Next, the protesters burned Trump in effigy, causing further damage to the monument. After that, they proceeded to march through the CBD and into the French Quarter, emblazoning buildings with more inane graffiti and making general nuisances of themselves. They even busted out the windows of a Chase Bank on St. Charles Avenue.
Despite the carnage, the NOPD took a disturbingly hands-off approach. Indeed, ironically the only citation issued was against a Trump supporter who countered protester by driving around with a pro-Trump flag flying the back of his pickup truck. He apparently tussled with some members of the crowd when his flag was stolen.
Mayor Landrieu followed up on this by pledging that the NOPD would do the opposite in subsequent protests.
“Those who wish to protest have a right to do so peacefully, however, lawlessness and destruction of property will not be tolerated in the City of New Orleans,” Landrieu said in a statement reacting to the protests. “I have instructed Chief Harrison and the NOPD to continue to maintain order on our streets and arrest anyone who damages property.”
Additional protests were held Thursday and Friday, and those went off without serious incident. Still, memories of Wednesday’s protest have lingered. Images of the Lee Monument clad in profanity and ridiculous slogans have been seen nationwide. The Drudge Report even used a photograph of the Trump effigy being burned on its main page over the weekend.
The unrest itself was a predictable result from a hotly contested election. The real question, then, is why the protest was permitted to get so out of hand to begin with.
The NOPD enjoys a well-deserved reputation for crowd-control, and yet Wednesday’s crowds were definitely not controlled. Either the NOPD was caught by surprise and thus did nothing, or it specifically decided to do nothing from the outset. In any case, it made a bad call.
The people who came to Lee Circle for some vandalism-laden catharsis do not represent our city. Heck, they don’t even represent anything other than a tiny fraction of the vast movement opposed to Donald Trump. However, permitting that small element to run rampant suggested the opposite, and that perception works to our collective detriment.
Of course, New Orleans isn’t the only city facing these problems. In many parts of the country, white nationalists and their vile ilk, taking solace in Trump’s election, have committed their own acts of vandalism throughout the country, even going so far as to harass specific individuals. This election seems to have brought out the worst in people, especially those predisposed to bad acts.
The fact remains, however, that Mayor Landrieu’s subsequent statement should have been the policy to begin with. General lawlessness cannot be tolerated, even in the name of allowing people to vent their political frustrations.
As the nation moves forward (and it will do so, for better or worse), we cannot allow the more extreme elements of our society to paint us with a broad brush. We’re better than that.
Owen Courrèges, a New Orleans attorney and resident of the Garden District, offers his opinions for UptownMessenger.com on Mondays. He has previously written for the Reason Public Policy Foundation.
We should all have the courage to stand up for our beliefs. I urge you to display your flag upside-down or, if you don’t have that level of commitment, fly it at half-staff. So far, since Wednesday the 9th, no one has tried to steal my flag, attack me, or molotov my house.
Of course, being in a precinct that was 96% against the Donald Duck Trumpet, I would expect my neighbors to respect my stance.
If you really do live in a 96% scum cesspool, then nobody will be affected by your upside down flag. (And hey, as far as I’m concerned, Obummer already turned the nation — and its flag — upside down, and now us Trump voters are just trying to put both things back right side up. That’s right: Make America Great Again.)
If you *don’t* live in such an environment, but still “no one has tried to steal my flag, attack me, or molotov my house,” then you’re unwittingly revealing how the violent persons who violate rights *aren’t* the Trump voters.
I imagine Mitch was in fetal position, watching his future employment prospects run down the drain. He’d better claim a street corner and get a pithy message for his cardboard sign. The Hillary-voting uptowners will surely be glad to help him out.
Democrats are being allowed by Democratic leaders to riot and vandalize without consequence. How can you protest the results of a valid election? You voted for a criminal and lost, so now you will protest by committing criminal acts all over the country, while the rest of the Democrats look the other way and make up hoaxes about pro-Trump violence. This is why Republicans dominated the election at every level.
I think part of the problem is the limited vocabulary of political activists and the media. It is meaningless to “protest” election results. I would call these demonstrations a “lament.”