What Does It Mean to Be a Politically Active Citizen If No One Is Listening?

[marmar]

From CommonDreams:


What does it Mean to be a Politically Active Citizen if No One is Listening?
by Paige Doughty

Over the last five years it has come to my attention that I do not live in a "democracy." That in fact, I have no idea what living in democracy might mean. A comment made to me during a recent conversation with a member of the press has exacerbated and confirmed this feeling on the most basic level.
"I live in D.C and I see at least one protest everyday. Protesting is not effective anymore. I hardly even blink when I see one on my way to work."

I bit my tongue to stop myself from responding, "Well, perhaps this is the problem."

In the year leading up to the current war in Iraq. I was living in Australia. There, I and hundreds of thousands of other people took to the streets in protest of the building momentum towards war. Similar protests took place around the world. Later that same evening as I was watching the news a rolling headline flew past my eyes on the bottom of the screen, with the words, "Thousands protest U.S. entrance into Iraq around the world, but media does not cover." The protests were under reported, but the major corporate television station I was watching did manage to include a meager headline reporting that they were not reporting thousands of people protesting. A month later the war began.

I was born in 1980. I missed the 60's and 70's, often touted as the "golden age" of a politically active citizenry. Now I am 26 years old and realizing that somewhere along the way my generation missed political action class. Perhaps it fell through the public school cracks somewhere between pre-calculus and U.S. History, when we talked for an entire semester about the Civil and Revolutionary wars, and the current state of our own country was never mentioned.

The political action with which my generation is most familiar is point and click. It goes something like this: receive a barrage of "email alerts" in your inbox, follow the link to the pre-written letter to your congress person, enter your email address and click to send. Wash your hands after a hard day of work. You are a political activist and you didn't even leave your house! This is a paltry excuse for action. But you can't say I haven't tried and did I mention I missed the class on political action?

Yet, what else is there to do? There are so many issues and problems, from the war in Iraq, to the war on the environment, to the war on free speech, I cannot keep up. Unless you are a member of the press vigilantly watching over every move that our government makes, both on national and local levels, there is no way for the average citizen to keep up with what is going on behind closed doors in the government hallways of this country......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0119-20.htm

[Paranoid Pessimist]

1. Read (or watch documentaries) of historical epocs such as

France in the 1790s or Russia in 1917. When reasoned protest falls constantly on deaf ears, oftentimes bloody revolution follows. I am not advocating this, just commenting.

[uberllama42]

4. This piece captures my feelings eloquently

I'm a college student, and I feel similarly frutstrated by a system which not only disenfranchises me but commits horrible atrocities with my tax dollars (meager as they are) and in my name. I actually feel worse after I send one of those automatic e-mails; all it does is demean the cause in question. My confidence in the practice of protesting, I think, will hinge on the results of the rally in Washington next Saturday. This will be the first big, visible protest I have ever been to. At this point I can only anticipate that it will be ignored if not stifled.

It's clear that we need to engage in some new and innovative tactics in order to make ourselves heard. I think boycotts are promising, seeing as how profit is so important to the Establishment and consumerism is their primary means of controlling the public. I just don't know how to organize something like that. Again, my generation missed the class on political activism.

[GOTV]

2. Most people are not listening but I believe some are...

There are a few people I've gotten active over the last few years. These things start slow. Do you devote some of your activist time to involving others?

[marmar]

3. I didn't write it...just posted it!

:)

[Demosthenes Locke]

5. The problem with the protests is

The reason why the media isn't covering these protests is because they aren't big enough. If you remember back in May of '06 when the Mexicans had their big nation wide protest every news station covered it. Why? Because the protest was huge! If you want to protest, make it a protest of such a great size that the media would have to cover it. That would definitely get the job done. I am not advocating illegal protesting, such as vandalism, but good, well organized protests with not thousands of people, or even tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. There are enough people in this country (over 300 million) that being able to organize a nation wide protest of a million people should be pretty easy. All you need to do is get a collaboration of every web site and organization catering to your "target audience" (for instance, this forum and MoveOn.org) and send a common message to all of their people. This way the word gets out everywhere to a record number of people and it could be possible to have an branch of your protest in every single major city in the country.