Arundhati Roy made an observation that non-violent resistance is becoming symbolic and that governments have simply learned to wait it out.
"Unless civil disobedience becomes real, not symbolic, there is very little hope for change" and very little chance to do damage to empire. (Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, 2004)
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-Why do massive demonstrations (Feb 15, 2003 for example) seem to end with people walking away, planning the next event, and feeling re-energized?<snip>
I think that the answer -at least in part- lies in the shallow North American notion of decency, morality and civility. We have, in some ways, gone from being citizens to consumers, and lost a meaningful connection to deeper issues, particularly those that don't appear to impact us directly.
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Is this civility?
In this harsh new world we are putting politeness and decorum above substance. Our attention is focused on how the homeless person smells, as opposed to looking at the issue of affordable housing. Sure, we can send books and care packages to U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but we cannot call the Bush administration a pack of liars for manufacturing their case for the invasion. For days last month, the image of a U.S. soldier holding a blood-soaked Iraqi child made the media circuit, but no such image of an Iraqi parent with their blood-soaked child is appropriate material. It is clear that we can tolerate a bland John Kerry or a challenged George Bush, but not an emotional Howard Dean.
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North America has shifted so far to the right on the political spectrum, while our notions of what is civil and what is extreme have moved right along with it. This change has caused many of us to back away from provocative tactics and principled stances that might disrupt traffic flow. Progressive groups are left struggling for ways to reach the North American multitudes without overly offending sensibilities, feeling that the average citizen is looking for any reason to tune out. This is not about tossing a brick through a Starbucks window, nor is it about "re-branding" ourselves to make social movements more palatable.
This is about slicing through expectations from our shifting society and hungry news channels and acknowledging the difficulty in making activism and resistance more than symbolic.http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7930