Edited in: in retrospect this is a very long and political post written very late at night. If I were you I'd skip it.




So it's 10:00 and I still haven't changed out of my pijamas, although I did clean myself up a little. I have to admit that I procrastinated badly, giving clothes to Renata, scatting to her piano improvs, catching up with some websites, calling people, binding broken books with packing tape, and finishing a few previously-abandoned books in between history chapters and math notes. But I eventually finished everything I set out to do, and my dad persuaded me to watch an old episode of My Favorite Martian over dinner.

The basic plot of the episode was that Tim went back in time and told a Native American chief not to sell Manhattan Island to explorers for $24 because it was a bad deal. It didn't even consider the fact that they really did gyp the "Indians." It was extremely racist, belittling their religion, characterizing their speech as broken English and literally calling them an ugly race. The worst part was the way it was framed as fun and patriotic, depicting the heroes as bravely winning territory back for the US. It's not as though this was made in the twenties with King Kong or anything, either; it came straight out of the early sixties.

It made me realize that there really was dramatic oppression within our country at one point--so dramatic as to be considered patriotic. I think that part of the reason for lack of motivation in political protests these days is the simple fact that political issues have become less dramatic since then. Most of the current protests are only attended by the groups demanding rights (like the immigration rally in Union Square last weekend) or pertain to international affairs rather than local ones. We can all vote, we can have abortions within six months of conceiving, and we have affirmitive action policies, unemployment and wellfare to prevent class division complaints. The political battles are vaguer now--when can we have abortions? How poor is poor? How much to tax each income bracket?

That's not to say that there aren't pressing political issues to be addressed. There certainly are. But they're not immediate enough to cause passionate protests or real movements anymore. They're overseas, or applicable only to small parts of the population, or based on religious principals that nobody is quite sure of. So nobody cares enough to do anything.

I have been criticized for my belief that protests don't accomplish anything (especially since I said something about it in meeting), but I strongly feel that it's true, and I speak from experience. I spent at least two years going to protests and political events several times a week, occasionally cutting play rehearsal to take trains to Washington or picket fur vendors and sometimes risking arrest. What I quickly discovered was that most protests don't even have coherent causes. Some are better than others, but most take on a festive quality and earn wonder from onlookers but achieve no real effect.

The weekend before last there were four protests within a ten-block radius of my apartment. It was nearly impossible to leave that radius without subwaying two stops out of it underground, which was ridiculous, because I lived eight blocks away from where I was trying to go, anyway. They all made the paper but none of them made the cover because frankly, it's not news any more. Politicians don't fear popular unrest because they expect it. It's trendy to disagree with whatever the government just did, anyway, so they're not really worried about it. There was a time when the prospect of 100,000 people walking to DC was frightening and could cause serious political reforms that changed the way Americans think.

In our modern quasi-socialist nation, the government has no fear of its people. Neither do the people fear the government. These days protests are so common and half-assed that they don't even seem to correlate to political events. There's no attempt to resist or stop them and no attempt to appease those that attend them. Just apathetic silence on both sides.

Even Cindy Sheehan was recently photographed smiling at an anti-war protest in a bright pink shirt with the sleeves cut off, dancing to rock music that supposedly supported the cause, and was quoted saying that "I'm having a great time."

A few months ago some of my friends from UBC walked to protest a cut in AIDS research budgeting and got arrested along with dozens of other people (and released, because Eddie studied law in college and remembered that they can't detain you overnight without a charge). The protest and mass arrests didn't make the front section of the Times, the Chicago Sun Times, AM New York, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Evening Star or the Onion. It certainly didn't effect any changes on the federal budgeting policy. In fact, all it did was help a bunch of people make friends and get excercise. It didn't matter that several of them had AIDs or were HIV positive. The government has developed an immunity to most types of civil unrest, regardless of their sincerity.

New York is probably 90% democratic, anyway, so they're usually preaching to the choir, and they know it--in fact, their entire code of behavior is based on the belief that everyone agrees with them. There's never any indication on the part of the protestors of a desire to talk things over or to persuade others to listen to their perspectives. Like Orwell's vision of government (I've been thinking about it a lot lately), a protest is an end in itself. The pretense of attempting to instigate change is only a historical facet of the protest, an interesting fact that doesn't effect the behavior of the modern activist.

What international crises like those of Darfur and Sudan need is real and effective resources: essentially, time or money. Protestors lend neither. Fundraising, volunteering or travelling abroad to the sources of the conficts are effective ways of working towards solutions. Even letter-writing has its place, although I doubt that it has a real effect on congressmens' decisions. Protesting doesn't.