I love Angela Davis. I really need to learn more about her. I saw this video posted somewhere during 2020, and for folks who can resist the urge to impatiently skip past what she's setting up in the beginning, the payoff at the end of her response to the banal question of whether she supports violence for her cause is (IMO) exceptionally powerful.
You're being downvoted because people people think you're being obtuse, but, as a person that overuses logical thinking to a diagnosable degree, my suspicion is that you're doing that. Also because your tone is kind of...not good.
The whole point of the Serenity Prayer ("accept the things I cannot change") is that it includes "change the things I can" -- so the things Davis is changing are things she CAN change, by definition.
But her point is that she is reframing what she believes she can and cannot change. Recategorizing, if you will.
She's invoking the third part of the Serenity Prayer: the wisdom to know the difference. As we grow and learn, our wisdom increases, so the things that belong in the first two categories will shift.
Things that used to be things that can't be changed are becoming things that she can.
To understand the quote, you just have to give it some space to breathe, and not be so logical about it.
There is a common prayer called the serenity prayer that includes a line about accepting the things you cannot change. The idea being it's not worth stressing out over aspects of your life that you have no control over and to instead focus on what you can do something about.
She is playing off that by saying she's no longer going to accept those things and is now going to fight to change them. I'm not familiar with her but presumably this would be regarding fighting injustices in the world.
Here is the full prayer (or at least the version I'm most familiar with):
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and Wisdom to know the difference.
In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies—including conspiracy to murder—she was held in jail for over a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972.
Because American media keeps pushing the idea that the Democrats are "the left" and because Democrats oppose guns because the Republicans promote them, they equate owning a gun with being a part of "the right".
Also far right conservative men are given all the permission in the world to threaten violence whereas many groups of people on the left, and leftism in general are defined by conservatives as inherently dangerous which both makes it practically much more dangerous to own guns and carry them (because you will just got shot by a cop and the cop won't even get in trouble they can just say "they looked dangerous") and also makes a culture of responsible gun ownership way harder to grow because the societal conditions around it are aggressively hostile to leftwing people owning guns.
Listen to the way centrists talk about the threat of violence from the far left and far right in the US, of course there are shitty, dangerous people on the left, but to compare the two as if there were similar amounts of violence coming from both is a ridiculous misstatement of reality.
Yeah - in non US places gun ownership only means one thing: you own a gun. It says nothing about your politics. And yes, US democrats being referred to as “left” is ridiculous. The Democrat party wouldn’t even be a centrist party in most (western) democracies.
Democrats don't oppose guns. Democrats are for base-level gun control. Republicans are insane, NRA-supporting fools who would rather 5 year old children get massacred weekly instead of have any potential gun controls.
Suppose you get falsely charged by the state because of your politics, what are you going to do? Get into armed conflict against the police officers coming to arrest you?
It's not like armed insurgencies don't happen in modern countries. Look up the IRA. Even if you are not keen on blowing up billionaires, you can still shoot meal team six as they try to bring back lynching and the KKK.
That said, disarming the country including the police, especially the police, would be more conductive to a peaceful life. So would actual democratic representation.
Then you get your single shot rifle and storm the the king's palace with it, against a bunch of people with single shot rifles, kill them all, kill a king, all his family, and thus establish a military goverment. Because it's apparently it's 19th century now.
perhaps at the federal level, but California and Washington liberals have passed sweeping gun control laws that severely impinge on law abiding citizens, and the AFT under Biden criminalized brace pistols, turning millions of law abiding citizens into criminals overnight. Only a SC ruling kept them from pursuing arrest for people who legally purchased their firearms, including a full background check for their purchases.
Yeah I'm becoming increasingly nervous with the blue states systematically trying to disarm everyone and the red states are trying to whip everyone into a traitorous frenzy over the dumbest shit while arming everyone with a pulse.
Otoh, and this probably sounds absolutely fucking nuts, I've found republicans tend to understand "strength" and they are strangely respectful of liberal and leftist gun owners because that's a dynamic they can comprehend. It's not a good state of affairs but it's better than them believing they can just run things because they're the only ones with "strength"
A militia made of a bunch of greasy brainwashed boomers would be put down in a couple days at most, even if it consisted of the entire population of republicans.
They're not the same, but they're kind of the same personality type. They frequently care about the same things, they just want very aggressive change to fix them. The issue is the path to get there and those are wildly different in terms of what the problem is and the underlying world view.