A few of the teachers at my school went to the Washington march last weekend, and many more went to the simultaneous march in downtown Austin.
These women are my friends and colleagues, and I tend to clam up when they talk politics (which may explain why I can get obnoxious here- I can unload on all you anonymous strangers!).
But it made me wonder- is there any political cause I care enough about to join in a 500,000 person rally? And the answer is hell no!
Last time I hung out with a crowd like that was the Simon and Garfunkel show in Central Park. Great music, surrounded by the nicest imaginable people… and you couldn’t pay me enough to do it again.
Anyone else who wouldn’t join even a wholly righteous throng of that size for all the tea in China)
I don’t like crowds, don’t like the noise, don’t like being elbow-to-elbow with people I don’t know.
But, once in a while, it needs doing.
I once was in a large protest, facing off against Operation Rescue. There was spitting. Extremely unpleasant. Also some minor shoving (on their part, not ours!) And really nasty name-calling, which doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as the spitting.
Can I just hit my big toe with a hammer instead? Hell no, I am never doing that. It is even worse than that. I have an automatic negative reaction to marches and protests in general that turns me against their cause. They could be marching against childhood leukemia and for free massages for life and they would still piss me off enough make me want to reach for a fire hose and tear gas.
I don’t like or respect overgrown toddlers. There are much better uses of their time.
What do we want? Time Travel!
When do we want it? It’s irrelevant!
I dislike crowds. I was going to say that I might be more tempted to join a celebration march than a protest, but I was in London on New Year’s Eve a couple of years back and despite the generally good-natured atmosphere, it was a pretty horrible experience - there were terrifying and sudden crowd surges at times, and then as the festivities began to die down in the small hours, it took us a very long time to shuffle, shoulder-to-shoulder in a massive press of people, the couple of miles back to Waterloo station.
The only thing that marches and protests do is turn me savagely against the cause. We were all watching one of the larger Trump Voter Rallies (the press called them BLM protests) and I explained it to my kids this way. When the butthurt brigade is stomping around carrying a sign, they’re actually saying: “I’m not happy with my life, and I want the other 300 million people to change it for me.” It’s futile and pointless. I asked the kids to think about what would work better, changing your life yourself? Or wailing for the rest of the country to fix it for you?
I’d say no, never, but… if all of the anti-Trumpers’ worst dreams somehow, as unlikely as they are, to come true, I’d join anti-fascism protests, as long as it didn’t inconvenience me too much.
The question and answers above are in the context of this wonderful life we live in the U.S., using the recent Women’s March as the example. To truly answer “for ANY Cause” we have to consider things like what we saw in the Arab Spring, where the protests were so powerful they did bring about change (one can debate whether all the change was for the better, but change nevertheless). I would join a mass protest if I felt that the basis of our American system were being threatened. That is not what is happening. I would not join a march like the Women’s March simply to make a statement. It’s an important and valid statement, but I’m not much of a statement-making guy because I don’t see how a single event like that is going to actually change anything.
Also, “This is what democracy sounds like” always makes me think “This is what a douchebag sounds like.” And “The whole world is watching?” Yeah, and eating popcorn.
I didn’t make up my mind to attend the D.C march until the day before, wnen someone offered me her bus ticket. Prior to that, I had told people I wanted to go, but deep down I didn’t really care. I kept thinking about the cold and the inconvenience and being around potentially irritating people all day long, with no escape. I treasure my weekends, and the prospect of spending an entire Saturday NOT laying around in my jammies didn’t fill me with enthusiasm.
But I am so happy I went. It wasn’t nearly as painfull as I had thought it would be. I actually had fun and came home feeling more hopeful and excited about the future.
I’ll be honest, though. Most of the good feelngs came from it being so publicized and well-attended. I finally convinced myself to go when it seemed like everyone and their mama was going. If it hadn’t been such a mega event, I probably wouldn’t have gone along.
Only if I can bring my far too young and unaware (although cute as a button) child with me and display them in front of the news cameras while they hold a sign they couldn’t possibly read or understand but which is worded in such a way as to imply that they themselves wrote it.
(A) Yes, Rosa Parks really should have focused on changing her own life, and just ignored all those pesky Jim Crow laws.
(B) The women’s march in DC had a pretty healthy mix of climate change related signs. Sure, individuals can do stuff to mitigate their own carbon footprint, but public policy is going to be necessary to really make a significant change. Individuals cannot fix climate change.
For the record, I’m pretty damn happy with my own life. Happy marriage, healthy kids, great job, active social life, etc. I marched Saturday because I’m truly frightened for the future of the planet, and as far as I can tell, the incoming administration just wants to stoke the fire and make it burn faster.
I am not a fan of crowds, and not a fan of chanting rhyming slogans, but as Trinopus said, sometimes it needs doing.
Plus, I want my four year old to know that we did everything we could against this administration, so he can’t blame us for spending the rest of his life cleaning this shit up.
When I was a teenager, back in the early eighties, I rolled with a small group of cute girls - er, retropeacenik hippies. Thoroughly ideologically based, not hormonal, at all. I swear.
I did a Mayday March, once. It was annoying because our “group” (by which I mean I was friends with one person and somehow ended up with all these other people) was suddenly a very violent-rhetoric man-hating lesbian group. A tad uncomfortable for me, y’see. And not entirely enjoyed by the majority of the ideologically-driven anti-war march. Cult of personality stuff.
That didn’t entirely put me off of engaging in movements - I’m an idealist at core (and any whiffs of alt-rightness the previous paragraphs might give you are actually that of burnt optimism - my politics remain leftist and progressive). So I went with a friend to a private peace rally, without learning much about it beforehand.
Cut to me and her sneaking off as this one speaker in an abandoned warehouse is patting himself on the back for taking part in the Beirut bombing of a marine barracks, and everyone else applauding. Holy fucking shit!
So, yeah. I’m not likely to join any group, for fear that any group will all-of-a-sudden try to claim that I’m supporting some insane, violent bullshit, without my consent. Kinda goes against my liberal, progressive mindset, believe it or not.
I also joined the democratic party shortly after Obama’s election, and had to forsake that bullshit after the first meeting when they made it clear that they (my state’s representatives) didn’t want to hear from “the little people”. Even the mainstream fuckers are assholes.
So, fuck no, I’m, not signing up for any group anything anymore.
Anything much over 500 and I’m out. Blame it on bad experiences in larger protests in the late 60s/70s where someone had to be an idiot and start something less than peaceful. I still have the limp from the skull fracture to remind me what that’s like. Yeah - any crowd can have an idiot. But the smaller the size, the easier for me to hide or at least curl into a fetal position.
I HATE crowds and will go to various lengths to avoid them. I have a friend who has some serious social anxiety and panic when in a crowd. But we both went to the March last week. My friend reasoned that her fear and anxiety of crowds was less important than what that March meant for her. She said that this wasn’t about her, she wasn’t going to make it all about her, and that it was important that as many people showed up as possible.
And people like us, people who hate crowds and who had never protested/marched in their lives- along with a couple million more people- made it clear to the world that this was the most widely protested US presidential inauguration of all time, protested in all seven continents. Clearly the new president will also go down in history and the most hated president of all time, which is delicious irony for an asshole who is solely obsessed with his image. It drove him completely up the wall that way more people attended the March than his inauguration, and was the top news story on most major news sites that day and the next day. And we’re still talking about it now.
Racists fucks in Selma taunted the marchers, saying they were being whiny entitled babies (well, they probably said worse than that, but I won’t say it here). The people who will end up on the wrong side of history mock us. People remember the marchers in Selma, but nobody cares about the racist fucks who tried to stop them.