Protest in Style
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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Four members of the Seminal staff decided to test out dressing professional for the Sept 15th anti-war march. Wearing suits they hit the street and found that reactions from both protesters and anti-protesters treated them better then they have thought would happen.
From their blog entry on the matter:
"We feel confident that a coordinate group of ten people, all dressed in professional attire, would present a striking visual image, and that a hundred or more would literally cause jaws to drop - and perhaps attract serious media attention as well."
You can read the whole story and see their pictures here: theSeminal.com
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Looking back at the photos of Martin Luther King Jr's marches, people were in their Sunday best. If you want to be effective, this stuff matters.
This also reminds me of a classic Matt Taibbi column on the protests outisde the 04 Republican Convention in NYC:
"In the conformist atmosphere of the late 50s and early 60s, the individual was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so weak that it was actually threatened by a single person standing up and saying, "This is bullshit!"
That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the individual's every conceivable political action into mainstream commercial activity. It fears only one thing: organization.
That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn't "creativity." It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.
Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the 60s—and this not only did not stop the war, it didn't even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an antiwar candidate."
(Link: Link
The thing is, though, this isn't a particularly arcane observation. In fact, it'd probably be one of the first things I'd care about if I were interested in designing an effective social action movement.
Which leads me to the conclusion that no matter what they say, the bulk of the people who show up for protests *don't really care* about ending the Iraq war.
They.
Don't.
Care.
If they say they do, they're either lying to you, lying to themselves, or both. Probably the second one, to be fair.
They derive social benefits from it as well as satisfying their self-image. Both are powerful motivators.