Protest works.

[Hannah Bell]

It’s astonishing to see how Americans have been conditioned to think that political action and engagement is futile....I’m reminded of this sense of despair almost daily in the comments section. Whenever possible action steps come up, virtually without fail, quite a few will argue that there is no point in making an effort, that we as individuals are powerless.

I don’t buy that as a stance, particularly because trained passivity is a great, low cost way to hobble people who have been wronged. I mistakenly relegated an article by Johann Hari in the Independent on this topic to Links, and Richard Kline’s commentary on it made me realize it deserved its own post...Kline comments:

"The nut of the matter is this: you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, they give up. As someone who has protested, and studied the process, it’s plain that one spends most of one’s time begin defeated. That’s painful, humiliating, and intimidating. One can’t expect typically, as in a battle, to get a clean shot at a clear win. What you do with protest is just what Hari discusses, you change the context, and that change moves the goalposts on your opponent, grounds out the current in their machine..."

Americans have cultural norms that work against trying to move the political/social needle. Class and economic aspirations are one of them; protestors are by definition malcontents, and thus presumed losers. Busy successful people obviously have not reason to waste their time this way, right?

Another impediment is the weird American fixation with optimism. Talk candidly about how stuffed up things are, and you can be dismissed as being “negative”. Despite how much it is revered in pop psychology and the “how to succeed in business” literature, optimism is not necessarily a good trait for long, hard fought struggles. Those who anticipate that success will come sooner than it does will find their hopes dashed repeatedly. Some may be resilient enough to themselves up and try again, but that isn’t universal (being pessimistic and tenacious is probably a better stance, but our culture does not breed for that).

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/protest-works-just-look-at-the-proof.html

Johann Hari: Protest works. Just look at the proof. Yes, you can choose to do nothing. But you will be choosing to let yourself and your family and your country be ripped off

There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s...Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence...

****summary****

Hari talks about how the British government was letting Vodaphone get away with not paying owed taxes, with consumers making up the difference, and how one man's protest "became the third most discussed topic in the country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what Vodafone and the government have done."

Then he talks about examples from history:

- The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill. Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people."

- How the Vietnam protests kept Johnson & Nixon from using nuclear weapons: "In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon – and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn’t do it."

"Protest raises the political price for governments making bad decisions...And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations."

- The effect a small continuing protest of six mothers who lost their sons in Vietnam had on Dr. Benjamin Spock's decision to oppose the war.

***end summary****

You don’t know what the amazing ripple-effect of your protest will be – but wouldn’t Britain be a better place if it replaced the ripple of impotent anger so many of us are feeling? Yes, you can sit back and let yourself be ripped off by the bankers and the corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But it’s an indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in your own self-defence.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-protest-works-just-look-at-the-proof-2119310.html

Truth forever on the scaffold
Wrong forever on the throne
Yet that scaffold sways the future

[Hannah Bell]

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