Burnt Orange Report

Protest Culture

By Jim Dallas

The Washington Monthly has a piece up about contemporary protest culture. The author concludes:

Perhaps in an age when blogs have given average people the pundit's power to bring down network anchors and Senate leaders and shape the nation's political agenda, dissenting Americans no longer need protests and marches to be heard. Yet there remains among many a need for something more—to have an adventure, to experience an historic event, to make direct connections with like-minded people. This existential desire, plus a certain nostalgia for the good old days, fuel much of contemporary march culture. Which is fine: Protesting for protesting's sake serves a market. But so do rock concerts and tractor pulls. If today's marchers want their efforts to mean a great deal more than that, they would do well to recognize the real reason why the marches of yesteryear are remembered. It wasn't just about the messengers. It was about the message.

This reminds me of an episode during my freshman year of college. I was bored one afternoon so I started walking around downtown Austin just to learn about the place. Eventually I managed to run into an anti-death penalty protest that was being organized down in Republic Park. To be honest, I've always been somewhat against the death penalty (because, frankly, there's something tacky and morally offensive about the degree to which capital punishment is employed in this state); although to be sure I've also always been more or less indifferent.

So I stopped by just to see what was going on. A couple minutes later somebody handed be a placard. It wasn't too much longer before I was more or less caught up in the moment, which I went along with mostly out of sheer Gonzo-esque curiousity. After all, we hear a lot about this great Austin protest culture, so I wanted to know what it was all about.

(At the time, I was a peon page-designer at the Texan; despite the fact I had no power over editorial copy at the time I never found it coincidental that the managing editor gave all staffers a good warning about getting involved in protests a few days later).

But my experience begs the question - how many people are involved in these things by accident, sort of like Forrest Gump?

Later on in my college career, I pushed the UDs to get active in the campus anti-war movement. There are of course somethings that are so important and likely to sway opinion (as I think a lot of people thought in the months before the war in Iraq started) that people of good conscience have to be involved. And then of course there's everything else.