Let's Revisit School (from an earlier Tea Party protest) © 2009 Michael M. Smith
From my office window I can see Michigan’s State Capitol building. On most workdays, during the spring and summer, there are organized demonstrations on the capitol lawn, each addressing a particular issue or grievance.
Today’s demonstration (24 June 2010) was huge. It was the Michigan Education Association and they were well organized—several thousand of them in coordinated tee-shirts. They arrived by the busload. Large circus style tents covered the grounds and as a mark of just how organized this demonstration was there were no less than 10 porta-potties on the southside sidewalk and behind the capitol sat 5 state police cruisers.
A couple of weeks ago it was the motorcyclists protesting the Michigan law that requires them to wear helmets. I appreciate their logic. If they prefer to have their unprotected heads smash the concrete at sixty miles an hour what’s the point of government trying to protect them?
Anyway, my point here is not about the MEA or helmet laws, it’s about demonstrations. Do they accomplish anything other than making the demonstrators feel better? I doubt it. As I said I see them almost every working day. And they follow the same pattern. Someone, or several someones, mount the capitol steps and deliver righteous messages to the assembled believers. At key moments the demonstrators hoot, cheer, clap and wave their signs in the air. But rarely do the legislators or governor come out to meet the crowd—unless they are in the midst of a reelection campaign. Mostly, it’s the demonstrators demonstrating for themselves and the amusement of the lunch crowd. It’s purely theater and most of it amateur.
In his TED video, Political Change with Pen and Paper, Omar Ahmad claims the most effective way to get the attention of legislators is to write them letters—handwritten. When they receive thousands of hand written letters they pay attention. However, when they look out their windows and see signs and placards bobbing up and down, it’s just another day at work. Letters are personal. Bobbing signs are anonymous.
It takes tremendous energy and money to move tens, hundreds and even thousands of people to converge on a single location, there to vent their frustrations and express their views—particularly when tomorrow there will be yet another performance by another group and the day after that another. And to what avail? Inside the walls of government the deals are made based upon political and personal expedience and favoritism. If bricks and bullets aren’t coming through the windows the demonstrations outside are of no more concern than the day’s weather.
© 2010 Michael Maurer Smith
I had to chuckle when I read this, because I sometimes think the same thing. Sometimes not. I think the Vietnam demonstrations probably helped make a big point on a national scale.
But the other reason I chuckled was last year when I was in Paris, the bus was very late. I stood in the bus shelter with rather a crowd of native Parisians and tourists, cranning our necks to look down Rue du Rivoli to see if it was coming. One of the tourists said to another, “I wonder why it’s so late,” and a Parisian with good English said, “Oh, it’s just another demonstration! We have them all the time!”
I couldn’t help but think it was interesting that demos were just taken for granted as something that comes along, and you just wait till the bus cuts through. We always make such a big deal.
Later that night I saw one myself (something to do with the soccer championships) and the book I just finished referred to the demonstrations as well. So, whenever I see them here, I think much as you do — and then, “But in Paris, we’d be dealing with them all the time!”
The demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the civil rights marches of the 60′s had a great effect. Of course those were the days of 3 networks and newspapers, no internet and no cable. Today with such an overload of information of all kinds–fragmented and largely without context, another demonstration is just added noise.
As we have all become consumers of the information of our choice, favor and bias, we have little time to consider the implications of the demo of the day, even if it happens in front of us. Watch one of these demonstrations closely and you’ll see people on their cell phones, tweeting, checking their email even playing games on their Droids. So I am cynical–read an observer, reader and listener. What I see, hear and read tells me that as a people, nation and world we are in deep deep trouble. We can’t ferret the meaningful from the information overload. And increasingly we are learning there is no one we can trust.
Our politicians in order to get elected and reelected of necessity become liars. They simply cannot afford to bite the hand(s) that feed them–big business. Consequently we the citizenry NEVER get the full truth from our leaders only the PR, the vetted line–the party line. So the cycle continues.
If your blood pressure can stand it, there’s a great read in the latest New Yorker called “Covert Operations”. It’s about the Koch brothers of Koch Industries, and the ways in which they’ve transformed influence peddling into influence steamrolling.
I do think contempt, stereotyping and intolerance are as much a problem as cynicism these days, and they’re popping up everywhere. I remember a time when “liberal” and “tolerance” went together, but today? Not so much.
I think, too, that the nature and value of demonstrations changed when the internet took over. It used to be that, if you were going to organize a demonstration, people worked together in person, constructed networks and got to know other people. Now, someone tweets a time and location and you get an aggregate of strangers showing up, not a community.
I suspect that’s one reason personal, even hand-written letters have such effect. They can’t be dismissed as just another bit of internet detritus.
It’s odd, but in spite of the craziness of our contemporary world I somehow don’t have high blood pressure.
I suppose you’ve seen, heard and read reports on the recent demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial, by Glen Beck and Ms. Palin. It is a clear exercise of free speech. Likewise it is a cynical demonstration of self-serving half-truths being spouted by people whose very words and actions contradict what they purport to believe. Somehow seeing this brought to mind Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, who so successfully staged the outdoor rallies for the Reich. It seems that discourse has devolved into little more than spectacle.