We see it all of the time in movies.
Hundreds or thousands of determined people congregate to protest some perceived injustice. The homogeny of the crowd’s state of mind is congealed as the shouts of the loudest voices among them are echoed and cheered. The announcement and reaction to the onset of war in Gone With The Wind is one example:
“It’s war! It’s war!”
“Yahoo! We’ll whip those yanks in 6 months!”
But it’s not only in the movies. People gather together because they share a cause. There have been protests for or against just about anything you could think of, including: Dr. King’s March on Washington, this year’s Tax Day protest, Vietnam Era anti-war marches, The Million Man March, and even the opening of the Michael Jackson film “This Is It”.
The media coverage of protests is always the same. They pick a side and file their reports from their selected point of view. The lens through which they look determines whether the protesters are cast as radicals or patriots; rabble rousers or concerned citizens; right or wrong. The media may not implicitly make these judgments, but the selection of who is quoted or put in front of the camera tells us more about the views of the reporter than of the protesters themselves.
These days, we don’t have to leave our seats in order to participate in a protest. Social media has enabled us to chime in via a retweet or a Facebook Like, but those options haven’t replaced the old fashioned pick up a sign and march method of protesting. I’m guessing that there is more to participating in a march than the need to get the word out. There must be something in it for the participants.
I’m guessing because I’ve never done it.
Have you?
A few months ago, I put this question to my Facebook friends and received these two replies:
If we judge them on their ultimate success or failure, some causes are deemed to have more merit than others. Still, there’s little doubt that social activism can bring about change. The change may come slowly, but it does come.
If this is true, why are there so many non-participants, like me?
- Is it that we do not feel strongly enough about any of the questions of the day?
- Is it that we assume that someone else will do it for us?
- Do we feel that things will work themselves out?
- Do we use our votes to get our point across?
- Or are we just too damn busy?
I don’t know why I haven’t felt strongly enough about an issue to let my feet do the talking. Maybe, I’m just not a slogan shouting, sign carrying, big crowd loving type of guy.
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Have you ever participated in a protest?
What was the outcome?
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Ray } – 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area means I see protest after protest on the news every day. Someone is always angry about something. And that’s just it, protests seem to be an angry way to “solve” a problem. Anyone can walk in a circle holding a sign and shouting. But what does that really do? It seems to only stir up controversy and bad feelings while giving the protesters an outlet for their passionate opinions. Protesting is a passive solution. It’s very nature is to get together and tell someone else to solve the problem. I say get proactive and solve it.
Hi Tristan, yes, it’s true that anyone can walk around carrying a sign, but what interests me is why people do it. Whether or not we believe that it is an effective means to address a problem (which I think that it sometimes is) there still must be something else that gets folks out of their homes and onto the streets.
Yours is a very interesting take on protesting in general, “It’s very nature is to get together and tell someone else to solve the problem.” This may be so, but it is also appropriate when the problem being protested can only be resolved by the governments or the big corporations that are being protested. Anti-war protests and anti-deforestation protests fall into these categories. An individual can do little if anything to affect change in either of those two circumstances.
Since you see so many of them on television, have any of them moved you to act by writing a letter, making a phone call, or donating to a cause, or have they become just background noise? Ray
The media skew the news, too, not just protests. You can read the same coverage here in Houston and on the national feed and get totally different perspectives. I guess the Houston media know who their audience is.
Have I ever participated in a protest? Yep. I was an active protestor in college. As an adult, I went to some La Leche league sit ins when someone threw a breastfeeding woman out of a mall.
I participate in lots more electronic protests. They’re easy and don’t require me to get sunburned.
I think that one does have to feel passionate about something in order to bother. There are lots of folks with passionate feelings who don’t, though, so there’s more to it than that. On the whole, I doubt protests actually change anyone’s mind, though they do tend to galvanize the opposition. Which may be why I have become less actively involved than in the past.
Hume put his finger on something very important. How do we change society?
Through the novel.
Hi The Mother,
Certainly, there is media bias in all reporting, but I was speaking to the affect that bias can have on a protest. For example, recently, dozens of Tea Party protesters received national news coverage, while a protest of thousands on immigration (by immigrants) was covered only by a few local media outlets. By simply not showing the immigration protest, the major media, in effect, made it disappear.
It seems to me that college students and retirees would be most active in protests. I went to college as an adult, so I missed the experience of being a young activist. It’s not surprising that you participated in protests as a student, and the sit-in seemed to be a good way to express yourself for a good cause as an adult. Was the sit-in successful?
I think that protests can be effective when they are large and sustained. When I read about or view documentaries of the civil rights movement, I marvel at the ability of the protesters to withstand physical opposition, confinement, and class structures that all worked together to squash their moral. Yet they persevered. It’s actually pretty amazing when you think about it. Ray