There have definitely been riots in the streets. In some parts of the world, there was with the Panama papers. But there weren't really many important Americans implicated in those papers. Here, we decided to riot over police murdering black people and the election of Trump, but it was honestly probably more about being sick of living with the pandemic than anything else. I think you have to be willing to riot first, then something has to happen for you to react to, and then we point at that event and say it caused the riots. But I think history is more of a series of catalysts than a true sequence of cause-and-effect.
Snowden changed the discourse, but it wasn't a catalyst for change, unfortunately. I guess we're just not ready to change. When we are, maybe we'll look back at these events as early precursors that showed stress in the system before it snapped. Or we'll view them like we do the Luddites: trying to reverse the inevitable course of history.
In my experience seeing a black neighborhood errupt in protests after seeing another black man killed - while I personally think that black man in particular was not innocent - that neighborhood was ready to riot. The police in that area were brutal, abusive, and racist. The people in that area were subject to segregation that saw them receive worse education and job opportunities than the white neighborhoods. The government was unresponsive to their needs and, on the contrary, viewed them as a nuisance bringing down property values, and hurting their stats on standardized test scores. Then a black man was killed and they said they'd had enough of this, and then everyone says "the went to the streets because that man was killed" - which is both true and irrelevant. A small breeze will knock down a house of cards, but the fact that the house is made of cards is more important than the fact that the breeze caused it to collapse.
Snowden changed the discourse, but it wasn't a catalyst for change, unfortunately. I guess we're just not ready to change. When we are, maybe we'll look back at these events as early precursors that showed stress in the system before it snapped. Or we'll view them like we do the Luddites: trying to reverse the inevitable course of history.
In my experience seeing a black neighborhood errupt in protests after seeing another black man killed - while I personally think that black man in particular was not innocent - that neighborhood was ready to riot. The police in that area were brutal, abusive, and racist. The people in that area were subject to segregation that saw them receive worse education and job opportunities than the white neighborhoods. The government was unresponsive to their needs and, on the contrary, viewed them as a nuisance bringing down property values, and hurting their stats on standardized test scores. Then a black man was killed and they said they'd had enough of this, and then everyone says "the went to the streets because that man was killed" - which is both true and irrelevant. A small breeze will knock down a house of cards, but the fact that the house is made of cards is more important than the fact that the breeze caused it to collapse.