Another week, another group of people taking to the streets to protest something or other.
They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Two weeks ago, it was the Greta Thunberg-led climate change protests. Last week, climate change again, plus the usual mass actions targeting various world leaders gathered at Turtle Bay for the UN General Assembly.
Maybe everyone is just having too good a time blocking traffic and throwing confetti to go home.
In April, it was March for Our Lives, the anti-gun march. In January, the Women’s March and also the alternative Women’s March, for leftists who hate Republicans and President Trump but don’t hate Jews as much as the leaders of the main march do.
There were lesser-known marches as well. The “We the People” rally a few weeks ago drew an anemic crowd to call for President Trump’s impeachment. Organizer Amy Siskind told the website Hollywood Life, “I got the feeling that people wanted to do something. They wanted to take to the streets and march.”
People “wanted to do something,” so what they did was take a nice walk?
The breathless media coverage of most of these nice walks obscures the fact that protesting rarely accomplishes anything.
“How can you say that?” goes the typical response. So much positive change in America has happened because of protests.
Sure, half a century ago, protests worked and sent the message that demonstrating was a part of the political process.
That time has passed.
Those protests — the lunch-counter protests, Rosa Parks, Selma and so on — had specific goals with specific targets. More importantly, the protesters were taking a risk. They could be, and often were, arrested. They were putting their bodies on the line for change. They didn’t do it for fun or just to vent rage.
They wanted to sit at any lunch counter, not just those reserved for African Americans. They wouldn’t move to the back of the bus. They demanded to be treated equally by their government and society. In short, they truly understood and focused on their cause.
Meanwhile, in 2019, we get the “viral twerker” at the climate protests last week in Washington, DC. If you haven’t seen the twerker, spare yourself, but suffice to say the protester in question is having a super-fun time dancing in short shorts against climate change. Who is the intended audience of the twerker or any of his non-twerking comrades? What is their point? No one knows.
When Thunberg led the kids out of school with their “Don’t be a fossil fool!” signs, the grownups patted them on their heads, pleased to see the next generation following in their bourgeois-left footsteps.
The kids walked out of school, because, hey, what kid wouldn’t? But what do they want and from whom? No one asked them, lest the whole thing be recognized as the farce that it was.
Even the protests with clearer goals than “Let’s change the weather” have been duds. The “Stop the Bans” rallies in May to fight various state laws curbing abortions didn’t actually stop any of the bans. The “Abolish ICE” protest in August that shut down the West Side Highway abolished many New Yorkers’ evening plans but did nothing against the actual Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Some protesters are getting the message. Here is what Micah White, one of the co-creators of Occupy Wall Street, had to say about the future of protest: “What will this future look like? From a strategic perspective, the most likely scenario is a rejection of the dominant activist theory that if enough people get angry in the streets, then change will inevitably have to happen. That approach is not working and will not work, because it fails to acknowledge the now-obvious fact that nominally democratic governments are not required to heed the wishes of protesters, regardless of crowd size.”
White urges protesters to take actual political action instead of just making a sign.
If only anyone would stop chanting to listen.
Twitter: @Karol