The "Normal Citizen" Revolt

Are they changing the power structure?

For a long time people didn’t really pay much attention to what happened at city hall, in the county, or in Pierre.

Recently that has changed.

Now hundreds of citizens show up for meetings and to protest at the capitol. These aren’t crazy people. They are normal people from all walks of life, from CEOs of companies to retirees. People from all political parties - Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

What caused people to unify and speak out?

Was it seeing first hand what kids were learning when classes went online, watching big companies use heavy handed tactics to seize private property, the mask and vaccine mandates, going to vote in the 2020 election and learning someone else had already voted for them, or having county and state governments try to sneak a data center into their backyard?

It’s not as if there haven’t been problems with elections before whether it was adding ballots in Texas in 1948 or hanging chads in 2000. Kids have been being harmed by vaccines for decades ($5.3 billion in payouts to date) and the academic performance of schools has been a problem for a long time.

Perhaps people could overlook one or two things, but seven or eight things at the same time was just too much. It was as if the shades on the “windows” were all opened at once and people had to face reality. Many things are broken and a lot of those things are impacting people personally.

One has to wonder if those in power added flames to the fire when they began to react to the activism.

For example, some elected officials became extremely condescending to the people they represent. Some of them tout degrees from fancy colleges, act superior, and call citizens names. Then a group of legislators didn’t make any brownie points by insinuating that the citizens were just too stupid to understand why we needed a 1500 bed maximum security prison for 39 maximum security prisoners or why we would spend $650 million on a maximum security building and allocate nothing to solve our recidivism problem (one of the worst in the country).

The people in South Dakota have a very long fuse, but when they become agitated and those it power refuse to listen, they unify and react. Once this occurs, it is nearly impossible to get them to give up.

It is interesting to think about how much progress they will make. Will they be able to stop the corporate welfare, improve education, clean-up our elections, get the prison situation under control, stop data centers, and keep state officials from overstepping their bounds?

What’s your guess?