There's a serious difference between civil disobedience and rioting, though.
"Distribute the absence of peace" - that is so far outside my worldview I can't understand it. My worldview calls that "violence". You can't "distribute" violence, you can only conduct it. You can't say "oh that was 10 units of violence, so we can spread it around so 10 people only get one unit each instead of all 10 going to one person."
There is no intent to "distribute the absence of peace" - it is pure taking justice into one's own hands, pure and simple. Don't sugar coat it. I don't fault them for that either - just say "we don't trust your 'official' police to do justice, so we are going to do it our way."
The problem is that justice by violence tends to escalate into the most effectively violent people being in control. This is not a society for which I want to strive.
And your perspective is exactly what riots are aimed at. It's not about convincing you to care by pleading to your ethics (you did after all just call destruction of corporate property violence which is an incredible but common linguistic trick of false equivocation). It's about forcing you to care because now it concerns you directly. That's the point of distributing the absence of peace. And the way you're talking about it right now just proves that it's effective.
It's about the majority of pearl-clutchers who when pressed will feel obligated to state that they find the murder of black people by police objectionable. But that same majority will do nothing about it but shake their heads when it breaks national news. Meanwhile, the number of black people unjustly murdered by police is orders of magnitude greater than the number of cases that make it to national news (
black men have a 1 in 1000 chance of being murdered by police). So they'll not have a second thought about being a Karen and calling police whenever a black person makes them feel nervous. They will not take the issue into consideration when engaging with politics (ex. Klobuchar will make middle-class white women feel empowered and represented, and they won't give a shit that
she fought tooth and nail to protect police against charges, including the officer who went on to kill Floyd). And generally float about life blissfully and ignorantly entitled and privileged.
If all you do is tsk tsk, call it a shame, and move on when a blatant murder takes place fully captured on video and that's the fullest extent to which you are aware of the issue, then you are the type of person a riot is aimed at. Because if the peace and order of your society is crumbling around you, then the situation now concerns you directly. That bubble of entitlement and privilege gets popped, and you are forced to experience the reality that the rioters have already been living with. You are forced to share and understand their lack of peace. This is what MLK meant when he called riots the language of the unheard.
And yeah, many will respond by seeing the rioters as thugs who need to be put back in their place. But others will be shocked into re-assessing the issue more honestly. Or if the riots keep up, they will see that continuing to tolerate the oppression of these people isn't sustainable and begin to prefer that their grievances be addressed so they can stop being faced with riots all the time. Either way, it forces a choice. And when a people is faced with being regularly murdered by the status quo, forcing the broader public to pay attention and take a stance, even if many take a stance against them, may be preferable to continue suffering under the status quo forever.
Also, most of the protesters are just doing exactly civil disobedience, like you prefer. I think it was one out of four seperate protests that was the riot. Four. And from what I've seen, all the photos of cops pepper spraying protesters are from the peaceful protest.
Also this. The rioting began only after police responded to peaceful protests with violence.
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