When I was in college, I always had a couple of radical friends who were involved in politics and protesting things. They paraded with signs outside of large corporations, and occasionally stopped up intersections and got arrested. I never saw the point. It seemed that all they managed to do was get themselves in trouble; what does a corporation or the government care about a few extremists and nuts?
When I left college, I found to my surprise that not only did I have time to myself to read about the world, but that it was deucedly interesting, and not at all what I'd imagined! Far from the fairly just, relatively honest world in which I had thought I lived, beyond the walls of my bubble there were hundreds of thousands of people being killed and billions of dollars being siphoned away from the public good, all by the actions of a few evil men in government and running corporations.
Almost everyone I knew were caring, honest people who, while they might disagree about the means, all had good intentions and would not knowingly endorse such terrible actions. But the evidence kept piling up that these things really were happening. How could this be?
The first enabler of corruption and evil is willful ignorance. Those who, like I had always done, stick their head in the sand and refuse to look. Playing ostrich, 'Don't tell me, I don't want to know' is one of the most basic psychological defense mechanisms. Looking only at the facts one wants to see is human nature; its incredibly uncomfortable to have your world view challenged. This happens across the political spectrum. I was an example of a moderate-liberal ostrich. David Brin has called in his blog for ostrich-hunting in hopes of rousing the conservative ostriches.
The second enabler of corruption and evil is apathy. If you've ever had the thought 'What can I possibly do to change things?' you have experienced apathy. This too, is a very basic and understandable response. The world is a huge place, and there are enormous power structures already established that will work very hard to resist change.
It is against these two enablers that protests act.
When 30,000 people march down Market Street in San Francisco, every car that is stopped, every passerby that is stunned, every shop that sees a change in its business has their ostrich head pulled out of the sand. The protest takes the far-away, unreal seeming war and shoves it right in your face.
When you break your routine and go to march, you are overcoming your own apathy and proving that you can have some effect. You stop traffic, see the helicopters circling overhead, and watch the battalions of police in place in case of riot. You, by joining with hundreds like you, have made this happen, made this corner of the world adapt to you. This can be repeated, from city to city, state to state, until you make the nation react.
I went to the anti-war protest yesterday in San Francisco. Yes, there were extremists and nuts, but there were also grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers with children, teachers, janitors, and engineers. There were black people, white people, brown people, people with white hair, and people with pink hair. They came together, to say to the world "We care, and we believe this is wrong".
As we marched, we saw many a person stopped by our progress. But the ones that struck me most are the ones who looked, surprised and questioning, but then joined in and marched along. The protest made a difference for those people; one far more personal than the effect on Washington so far away. Perhaps they will tell the story of the protest this week at work, of how the energy of the masses pulled them in, and perhaps the story will spread. I know I will be talking about it.
The politics of protest are an area that have come to be associated with extremism. But I have yet to see anything that as directly assaults the two ignoble enablers of evil that I have highlighted in this diary. So I must conclude that until we attain a government without evil, protest is too important to be left to the extremists and nuts.