Streets Of Fire

 Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy

'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy

Mick and Keith wrote that in 1968. When he wrote the music, Keith said he was influenced by the drone of police sirens. Mick said he was inspired by the protests in Paris and America. Back then, the time was definitely ripe, if not right, for fighting in the streets. 

Boy. 

Now it's 2020 and the time is once again ripe/right. Last weekend saw a series of confrontations between left and right. At Stone Mountain Park, Georgia, home to the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, heavily armed far-right protesters attacked anti-fascist protesters with pepper spray. As fistfights broke out and pro-confederates with assault weapons pointed their rifles into the crowd, police and the National Guard arrived to shut the mess down. A far-right paramilitary group called the Three Percenters had requested authorities to hold a two thousand person rally at the park. They were denied. Which didn't keep them from showing up anyway, along with the attendant counter protesters there to make sure  that all voices would be heard. Loudly. I suppose we can only be glad, in hindsight, that one of the "three principles" of the Three Percenters is to "only fire unless fired upon." There is no mention in those guiding principles about using a "Don't Tread On Me" flag to poke at people with whom they disagree. 

Why am I suddenly thinking of Geraldo Rivera? Maybe because it was his clever idea, long before he became the elder statesman of Fox News, to bring a bunch of Nazi skinheads on his show for a "discussion" about race relations with civil rights activist Roy Innis. The resulting melee was caught on tape and became a bellwether for future events of this sort. 

That was in 1988. Twenty years after The Glimmer Twins wrote their song about fighting in the streets, America witnessed fighting in a TV studio. 

Thirty-two years later, alt-right Proud Boys were met with an unsurprising group of counter protesters in Kalamazoo, Michigan. At this point, you can kind of assume that if you're listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center's watch list, you're probably not going to have a nice walk in the park when you show up for your rally. “The Proud Boys came to town and completed their mission by creating a divisive situation for the community then leaving, hopefully with the chaos continuing, which is their MO,” reported Kalamazoo's Public Safety Chief Karianne Thomas. Witnesses on the scene gave accounts that said police waited twenty to thirty minutes before intervening when the two sides began to clash. 

And Geraldo wasn't there to get it on video.

Which is fine, because anyone with a cell phone was. 

Mick and Keith were not available for comment.