By Irene Morrison

“Well it’s not like it is in France; you get a million people on the streets there and the French government hides in the basement.”—Anonymous Buffalonian

“New Wave” activists—and many of the old wave—believe that street protests in the US are no longer worth organizing. What exactly, they ask, have protests really done to further whatever cause one is protesting against? And when has the public noticed or cared on any specific issue? It’s not easy to point to a specific example in the US since the Civil Rights movement.

Are people more complacent than they used to be? Maybe, but the real problem does not seem to be that protests have lost their innate ability to be effective. It is the approach organizers take to them that can make them ineffective: the lack of anything new or innovative, an unwillingness to challenge authority, the lack of a clear message, and finally the dependence on mainstream media to spread an already unclear message.

The most recent large protests that Peace Center folks were involved in happened on Wall St; they probably drew 3,000 people in two days of protesting (organizers claimed 10,000, but most people I talked to at the protest didn’t believe that figure). The message was muddled—from ending the wars to bailing out students and workers instead of Wall St fat cats, and we received very minimal press coverage. Rival back-to-back protests further spread the coverage and the message; one protest was more militant than the other (not to mention a lot more fun than the other). And the second day of protesting was scheduled on a Saturday when Wall St wasn’t open, so we were essentially protesting for no more than a few news cameras.

Protests it seems today do little more than energize the people at them. And sometimes they can be more draining than energizing. The traveling public subjected to closed streets or just minding their own business who glance at a flyer really don’t seem to care; it’s just another protest. Just another bunch of looney-lefties demanding things they have little
likelihood of changing.

If we’d all done something radically different at that NYC protest-- for exmaple wearing nothing but body paint-- we would have gotten more coverage. There have been some encouraging new ways of protesting: CodePink’s innovation of wearing pink in solidarity, and their thruway overpass banner-drops were new and got pretty good coverage. But even they are fast becoming old news. As the attention span of America gets shorter, our need for innovation becomes even more important.

Furthermore, the US government does not have a healthy apprehension that protestors will really stir things up. We stay behind the barriers set up by police, we participate in very little in the way of nonviolent direct action: sit-ins, marching without permits, blocking streets and entrance to government buildings, and so on. There is no disruption of the status quo, no stopping of business as usual. Protests have become political parades. They are not sustained; after a few hours of shouting people walk away and go about their business.

And what if we’d had a much clearer message? If the two disparate organizations who called the recent NYC protests had come together in the name of solidarity for the cause and had agreed on two or three main issues to protest over, and held the protest on a single day, there would have been a much better likelihood of good coverage. It would have also helped if there were two or three talking-points to stick to, instead of a jumble of progressive and left-wing causes.

Perhaps the biggest and hardest-to-solve problem is that of media coverage. The peace movement relies far too heavily on Big Media to convey their message to the public. Big Media has an agenda and a tendency to distort our message or to give it little coverage. Yet the movement seeks only to call them our on their agenda and lack of coverage—hoping they can somehow guilt them into providing more coverage—rather than creating their own independent media. The International Action Center and Workers’ World are notable exceptions, but there is still a void of independent media across the country.

We can emulate recent protests abroad (socialist uprisings in France, G-20 protests, and more) and in those in the US in the 60’s and 70’s that were effective and incited policy change. We need to be more innovative and creative, be willing to get arrested for nonviolent direct action, have a clearer message, and—perhaps most importantly—create and expand our independent media. It’s no easy task, but it’s got to be done.