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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Okay, maybe hate is a strong word. But I've seen enough of women making themselves look ridiculous by wearing hot pink aprons, bonnets, and other acoutrements of traditional femininity, and then attracting all sorts of negative attention by heckling at public functions (such as the DNC Winter Meeting). Now they've really taken a step too far: they're camping out, Crawford ranch style, in front of Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home! For real! Give the lady a chance to work pragmatically to end the war! When was the last time any of these Code Pinkers tried to negotiate with the Bush administration and Congressional conservatives? As a very smart senior colleague of mine once said, "If you chain yourself naked to a tree to protest the war, the story will be, "Crazy person is naked, chained to a tree,' not 'End the war.'"
Werd.
I think that doing things like that really only serve to raise their own profile in the activist community and make themselves feel better, when in reality they aren't affecting anything (or maybe they are in a negative way).
An extreme example of this is the (so-called) "Earth Liberation Front". When they blow things up, they don't halt any of the practices they oppose, just ostracize environmentalism in the public mind and give the "corporate oppressors" a nice fat insurance check.
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The living wage group on campus pulled a hunger strike on my campus to get their way. I wasn't a big fan, either.
Democrats NEED to be protested.
Why? Because they are more receptive to it than Republicans. WE voted them in; THEY are accountable to us; WE will not give them "more time" when every day they don't act against the war more people die.
Where's the pragmatism in that?
I mean, really, the Democrats only have so many votes. Would you rather have the moral victory of forcing a veto, or an actual piece of signed legislation ending the war? That should be an easy answer.
I was there too, and I certainly think you could argue that it was rude to interrupt a speaker at that kind of event. But I actually thought it shed some light on the topic.
I myself had wondered why progressives in Congress seem so unwilling to pass any bill cutting off war funding, was it just because they feared rightwing backlash?
Well, Hillary Clinton responded to their heckling by explaining that you need 60 votes in the Senate and Republicans would filibuster any vote to cut off funding. I'm sure this is true and I hadn't realized that before.
So I thought that in some ways it was a productive internecine debate that they fostered, however rudely.