Then you should expect the response that the police are havingI literally never expected anything other from cops than what they ' re doing at standing rock . Ever . If you did you ' re naive . But I ' ve learned , again , that it doesn ' t matter if people are violent or not . They ' ll get violence from cops anyway and the American right and media establishment will defend the police as much as possible . What if , and really consider this for a moment , the police have no legitimate right to use force on anybody , never mind protesters ? What if at the end of the day they ' re just another street gang in a world full of them when you strip away the veneer of legitimacy the state provides ? I ' m not advocating people go an pick up guns . I am lambasting the complete hypocrisy of liberals and conservatives alike on this issue . Nonviolence was once a radical idea . Now it is an excuse to demonize causes that threaten the power structure . Gandhi is rolling in his grave at the misuse of his legacy by various sycophants in the US . The irony is that this total insult to the concept of nonviolence undermines it . It renders it meaningless . If nonviolence is supposed to expose the brutality of the state , what happens when it does that and the public says the brutalized deserved it anyway ? People such as yourself give birth to your worst nightmares . You don ' t listen and empathize with the oppressed , you make excuses for a power structure that assaults them , and then you get indignant when some native kid throws a rock back at the people who shot his friend ' s eye out with a rubber bullet . You ' ll keep making excuses , and all the while that same native kid learns the hard way that appealing to the morality of a nation lacking in morality is totally useless . The rocks get upgraded to molotovs . Rinse repeat . You want to talk about having your cake and eating it too ? You pretend to care about nonviolence and then deride it when it shows its face . Then you bitch and moan when protesters stop asking and start taking . You don ' t get to do that . You don ' t get to render nonviolence a meaningless tactic with your own apathy and then bring it up to justify the violence of authorities .