In the OP, Walter Windchill asked,Did all of the organized protests against Bush make a difference in the last election?
Protests against Mr. Bush are sort of a special subset of protests. No protests have been allowed within sight (or camera’s view) of Bush for a long time. Audiences to his speeches are carefully screened, and in some cases folks had to sign a pledge to vote Republican to get in the door. Long before Bush gets there, protesters are taken to a fenced “free speech zone” half a mile away. He is surrounded by a cocoon of well-wishers wherever he goes, and his “town meetings” are all scripted and rehearsed. There’s a careful illusion that everyone agrees with him, and the TV networks don’t do much to debunk it.
So, did protests have an effect on the election? No, because most voters were unaware there were any protests.
You are reading too much into this. I would guess your everyday police officer has political views far from most protesters.
The protection comes from the initial right to assemble what may become an angry mob and the anomininity associated that comes with that. My view simply comes from the idea that most protests are just ineffective circle-jerks that may harm other people. Even if that is stopping traffic, it is a senseless, criminal, thuggish waste.
My job as a consultant is all about efficiency and it drives me crazy when I see a misuse and abuse of resources like that. I dispute the effectiveness of protesting in general as opposed to more focused methods. If they actually sound ideas
I focus more on the methods to arrive at the conclusion than the conclusion itself. People could picket outside my workplace for me to get a 50% raise and I would still be pissed off about it if they didn’t have their facts and logic straight. Protesters are usually the political equivalent of religious fundamentalists and I don’t take well to that kind of ignorance.
Try chatting with them logically about their issue sometime. I have and the ignorance is astounding. It typically isn’t the engineering and pre-med students out there, it is the people that want to just make a difference somewhere regardless if they understand the issues well or not.
Combine all this with the backlash that can come from public protests and I conclude that most groups would be better off using more well though out methods assuming their position can survive more intelligent processes.
That’s probably why you think they’re “boorish, naive and uninformed”. If you did see a demonstration that agreed with your own views, you’d probably consider the protesters more intelligent, informed and aware.
I think that you would have found the heart of Coretta Scott King’s Funeral to have been everything to the contrary. Several joined what Atlanta’s mayor described as the “Freedom Chorus” that day. President Bush had to sit through it with what I suspect was mostly 10,000 civil libertarians and some very pointed comments.
As for protests, yes, they changed my mind about the war in Vietnam and I joined them. At one time in the mid-1960’s, I had signed a petition in support of Johnson and the war while I was in college. I just wasn’t thinking.
The same was true for women’s rights. The protests got my attention and prompted me to question things that I had not thought about before.
I believe in peaceful, non-violent protests. And I do believe in civil disobedience. Thoreau influenced Gandhi who influenced Martin Luther King, Jr.
After the murder of Amidou Diallo I needed to do something. I was horrified, outraged, angry, sad, disgusted, hurt. I needed to take a stand and marching across the Brooklyn Bridge in the cold with other outraged citizens was my choice. Perhaps we didn’t change anything (the police were acquited), but I wanted my body to be added to the count of thousands of people who didn’t understand this murder. I wanted the world to see that we all are not barbarians. (yes, shooting an unarmed man in the lobby of his building is indeed barbaric) I wanted his mother to know that the murder of her son affected me too.
It’s amazing to me that you don’t consider the nonviolent civil rights protests worthy. Do you think MLK, Jr. really wasted everyone’s time?
Yes, it’s true about that event, and once or twice a year when he speaks on MLK day or before the NAACP, when he bothers to talk to them, he faces a real audience where people say things that make him squirm. It doesn’t happen often. Did you see any of his “town meetings” when he was still trying to sell his Social Security plan? Most of the folks with scripted questions started out with, “First of all, I thank God that you are president.” All naysayers were screened out.
In foreign countries, when he is heckled, he chuckles and says, “I love free speech.” He doesn’t see much of it at home.