MacDonald and Symmonds

Right now, we are in an era with a lot of protesting and rioting, mostly in response to the government and disagreement on citizens’ rights. While more and more people decide to participate in riots and protests, there are still a lot of people who do not. I think a factor in deciding whether to participate stems from what it would make people look like to others. MacDonald and Symmonds (2018) state that the approaches used by libertarians “focus on analyzing and confronting structural oppressions.” The way I perceive this is that people who participate in protests, aka libertarians, really focus on the problem and the ways of confronting or fixing the problem rather than how it may look to others. I feel like these people are so passionate about the presented issue that they do not care about how it may look to others nor do they think about the repercussions of their actions. However, there are other people who may focus more on how others perceive their actions because of “communal traditions.” I think that many people do not participate in protests or riots because they are used to following the norm of not speaking out against things. While I think that protesting is good for expressing your feelings about a topic, I think that there are still a lot of people that do not think it is good and who will judge people based on these protests.