Teargas, bullets, and water canons or free speech?

 I went to a rally on Wednesday--partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed to write an essay about it--protesting unfair labor laws. They were also protesting the fact that the contingent faculty have been told to not form a union... it's all a complicated mess, but I came away from the rally with a few things. I couldn't help but think about what this rally would have looked like in Uganda.

As people began to carry a red banner and chant about justice, I started to get nervous. You see, in my world, if you see a group of people, run the other way. If you hear a group of people yelling, get in your car ASAP and get to another part of town. Try and go the opposite direction of the trucks full of riot police and water canons. If all else fails, stick close to the riot police because if you're white they will look out for you.

Meanwhile, be prepared that the group of people is about to suffer.
Teargas canons will be fired. Water cannons will be used to dye people pink so that they can be associated with the riot and arrested. Rubber bullets will start to fly.

The police begin a hunt for anyone and everyone involved. My strongest recollection of this is when the police tear-gassed a pre-school. A lot of kids had to go to the hospital.

What happens so that things devolve so quickly?

In 2011 the government decided that the opposition was not allowed to walk to work to protest rising gas prices. As crowds followed them, the police arrested anyone and everyone. This angered people. We ended up with three weeks of riots. My mom had to drive through a burning barricade to get me from school, and I had to help a family navigate our way home through back roads.

According to the Ugandan government, a group of more than 20 people has to be approved by the police or be subject to arrest. Imagine how much that angers people.

In 2009 I remember hearing the first gunshots from my house. Followed by yelling, screaming, chanting. We didn't believe what it was at first. But as the night went on, it became more and more clear: things were becoming dangerous.
The next day at school we all swapped stories.
"I had to drive past burned out trucks at 6:00 this morning to make it to school before the riots started again. The road was still smoking. I heard gunshots for three hours... did you hear gunshots?"was my summary.
"Our car got stones thrown at it from the rioters. I had to duck down to keep from getting hit" my friend Sabine said.
My friend Lea won with a picture of her dad's car in flames. Thankfully, her dad had gotten safely into hiding.

What makes these two worlds so different? How is it that in one place a peaceful college protest wraps up within an hour and the school responds by peacefully explaining things to students, while in another part of the world people die and riots continue for three weeks?

There are so many explanations, from "Uganda is a dictatorship. It won't allow freedom of speech" to "Go America, we can do whatever we want" to my least favorite "Why is Uganda so violent?".

I don't really want to adress any of these ideas. It is what it is. In one part of the world, a walk to work results in death and teargas. In another part, a loud protest leads to an apologetic email from a school. You can't really explain away the difference. They are different worlds. Different mentalities.

I would almost hesitate to say that we should judge Uganda. It is such a different world, a world where instability must be crushed in order to avoid years of instability while at the same time instability is becoming an inevitability.

My intent in writing this was not to propose a solution or to examine what's wrong with one system. It was simply to say the following: the world is diverse; the world is not free; what we think is freedom is often the opposite; and we live in a broken world.