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Cross-posted with The Signal Wire.
We’ve seen the world shaken this year by waves of protest movements, and even Time Magazine has declared the protester person of the year in a poorly written article. There’s no question that protesting has a great potential to change things. Still, we should ask ourselves – when we protest, what are we trying to accomplish?
Protests are a show of force, and in some places, they can be used to show leaders that there is a dedicated and motivated group that backs a certain position. This carries an implicit threat – if you cross us, we will mobilize against you. In the US, this is often ignored since politicians see money and lobbying as a much greater source of power than protests, and in general political groups have yet to use non-monetary political methods as effectively as monetary methods. Many (though not all) protests are also viewed as coming from fringe groups that don’t represent America.
Another possible goal of protests is to bring attention to your cause. This is an important one, but one that is also more complicated than many seem to realize. First of all, one should be aware of their target. I’ve heard numerous stories from people who are supportive of a cause but were so turned off by the theatrics of some of the participants that they didn’t want to return. If supporters are feeling alienated, it’s hard to imagine that people on the fence will be swayed to support the cause.
Another issue is media attention. What happens if there’s a protest and no one watches? There were massive protests before the Iraq war, but the media was mostly silent on them. The Occupy protests now are much smaller, but they’ve been able to capture the attention of political blogs and left-leaning shows on MSNBC (though MSNBC is much more establishment and pro-Obama than the protests themselves), which then spread to other media outlets. This has allowed the Occupy movement to reach an enormous amount of people that otherwise would have never heard about it.
A third reason to have a protest is to rally supporter for your movement. Though this is very important, there needs to be infrastructure in place so that supporters can actually connect with the movement, and there has to be a strategy to make use of your members and supporters to do things other than just protesting.
Protests are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and in order to be effective we must have a clear view of which goals we are trying to achieve, and what our strategy is for achieving them. We have to ask ourselves: “What is my destination, and how will this path take me their?”
2 Comments
All good points, and I’m in full agreement. I would like to add an important intangible that can also spring from the smallest protest. Despite the dangers of acting against the tide especially a BLOOD TIDE.
I was among the earliest protestors against both “Desert Storm ™”, and then the second even more disastrous “Shock and Awe ™” full invasion, or Act II of the MIC’s occupations in South Central Asia.
Standing with a few hearty souls along side the rush hour traffic, on US Highway 1 south of urban Miami, in a very conservative section of town we few stood nearly alone. The few furtive signs of solidarity signalled sometime from only one occupant sprinkled among the majority of Thumbs Down and Middle Finger up signal, or our favorite the “finger drawn across the throat” that we saw quite often.
These surreptitious signs of solidarity convinced us, that many of those who were morally with us, needed a public acknowledgement to comfortably express their opinion. They needed the comfort, the “space” for confirmation of their honest belief, that the war, no matter the Cheerleaders, was bloody murder at its technological peak of efficiency.
SHOCK and AWE … that we dared oppose the status quo.
solidarity & peace
Rick@AveryVoice.com
http://www.NewMercuryMedia.com/pnn.html
Thank you for this reflective diary. This is a good time to pause and look back, and I am sure those in the Occupy movement are taking stock of what has been accomplished so far and where protest can lead in the coming important year.
I would like to make one correction to your narrative, and that is where you describe what the successes have been in terms of political blogs and mainstream media. For many who post on these forums, both of these are important sources of information still, even in times when tv and radio are showing signs of corporate control and less than ideal manipulation of the truth. We are still very much under their spell.
The one sign I have seen across this disastrous year that is a sign of hope is that increasingly the spell is being broken when it comes to that activity of protest which takes people and peoples out of their comfort zone and into the streets. And I would take exception to your claim that the Occupies are small. They have shown themselves at critical moments to be not small at all but something approaching universality. In many countries that universality is only being accomplished at enormous cost. Not only livelihoods but lives are being sacrificed.
We saw when armies fought in Iraq, that even if the conflict was manufactured, the bond of soldier brother or sister with the slain comrade because a motivating factor that far outweighed any sense of the overall justice of the war itself. Here in the Occupies we have a just cause, or many just causes, coupled with that same sense of sacrifice; and thanks to the obstruction of our riot police all over the country, that sense of brotherhood has been strengthened.
This is an enormous movement, going now far beyond even the injustices it protests against all over the world. It will succeed where wars have failed, because it is nonviolent and that nonviolence supports the comraderie in ways no troop or army comraderie can. Because the latter comes with ptsd and the psychic disorders warfare invitably brings along as baggage. There is no ptsd connected to nonviolence. The nonviolent are blessed; they have good dreams; they are proud of their commitment.
I watched Harry Belafonte on Charlie Rose last night – he was the reason I always check to see who the guests are before I turn him off. Harry Belafonte was the reason. He comes from my era, and look at the man – he is such a man! He personifies nonviolent protest, and in his words and thoughts and actions he is the best we humans can aspire to be. A beautiful man or woman.
So too Occupy. It still has its rough edges, but it is going the right way and it is being born.