"Whatever Its limitations, Street Protest Matters"

Meteor Blades (front-paged on Kos):

I can tell by the paltry response to recent Diaries on the subject that most Kossacks won’t be joining tomorrow’s National Day of Action Against the War in Iraq. Not even most Kossacks in the 12 locales where major protests will be taking place.

There are lots of perfectly understandable reasons for not going. You’re not actually against the Iraq war and occupation, for instance. You live 500 miles from the nearest protest city. You have a Saturday job. Or a project deadline. You need to study every hour of the weekend for a Monday exam. You promised to take your daughter to a ballgame. You desperately need to recreate after a tough week. You have serious mobility problems. You’re ill. You don’t want a photo of yourself in a protest march showing up on your pro-Bush boss’s desk. Or you just don’t want to go, period.

How can I legitimately argue with any of that?

But if you’re free from obligation at the time the nearest antiwar protest is held tomorrow and you’re staying away because you don’t like the organizers or because you think such actions are passé, I have to ask – respectfully – what will you be doing tomorrow to try to end the war?

Assuming, that is, that you are outraged by the gang which dragged our nation into Iraq with a net of fabrications and fear-mongering, made portions of Saddam Hussein’s reign look like the good old days, sought (and continues to seek) to legalize torture, engaged in rendition, caused the premature death of 4141 coalition soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 5 million Iraqis, committed atrocities but (when caught) called them something else, turned legitimate concerns about self-defense into corrupt profit centers for their cronies, is now spending $273,000 a minute to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going, is preparing (perhaps) to begin yet another war, and is working daily to dismantle basic constitutional rights – including the right of dissent against all the above.

I ask what you’ll be doing because I’m convinced that street protests remain one needed tool in our effort to stop the war, to prevent the next one. If you aren’t convinced, I’d like to know what you do consider to be effective. Whether you think writing another letter to the editor or to your Senator is the right approach. Or going door-to-door for an antiwar candidate. Or whether you believe that only a general strike, or a revolution, or waiting until January 20, 2009, is the way to go. Whether you’re totally jaded or deeply in despair after five years of opposition to a war that so far has lasted half as long as Vietnam.

Because, as I said, street protests are one tool. Not the only tool. Not necessarily the most important tool. I am respectful of anyone who is doing anything to stop the war. But, as I wrote two years ago in Quit Your Bellyachin' About Antiwar Demonstrations, street protests are not a tool to be abandoned either. As with any non-Ikea project, you need an assortment of tools to get anything built.

There are those who argue that protests are useless because the media doesn’t cover them anyway. And even when they do, they distort what happens, focus on the most outrageous "characters" or, just as often, give at least as much attention to handfuls of counter-protesters as to the main event.

All true. Street-protest organizers could stand to become more media-savvy. It’s easy to critique the media, but harder to manipulate them – a very worthwhile skill when fighting the incessant flow of propaganda these conduits spew. Antiwar Gold Star mothers have important stories to tell, and they don’t have to be camped out in Crawford to get local media interested. But even if no media come – or those that come do so only to record "the incident" in which to frame everyone – street protest can have an impact. Especially the kind of nationally coordinated, locally planned and organized protests happening tomorrow.

Since before the war began, I have argued that a relentless phalanx of ever-growing protests in numerous cities would be more powerful, more visible, more democratically run, more community-empowering, and ultimately, more effective at bringing about change than the occasional big protest in Washington, D.C. So it will surprise nobody that I am glad to see the arrival of October 27 and its 12-city protest itinerary.

Some people will ridicule that. They’re fed up with protest rallies and marches. They say that I and others like me need to stop living in the ‘60s and understand that it’s now a YouTube world where one good video played to a million eyeballs will do more damage to the misrulers and warmongers than any march down any number of Broadways could possibly match. I admit it. I have some fondness for the barricade-storming days of my youth. But if it’s true that YouTube and other innovations of wwwLand will eventually make older forms of protest obsolete, then: Hurrah. I’m no Luddite. I'm happy to learn new ways. However, until this heady combination of electrons brings down the Cheney-Bush regime or firms up the collective Democratic will to stop the funding of this on-going imperial atrocity, let us say I’d like to have a back-up plan.

Other people have told me they’d like to go to an antiwar protest march. They used to go, or their parents once did. And they still believe that maybe these can do some good. But, they object, the organizers have included too many speakers. A few of those speakers support causes that have no place on the platform at an antiwar rally.

Yep. This is what it means to work in coalition. All of us who oppose the war and the politicians and corporadoes who got us into it don’t agree about everything. Sometimes vituperatively. Just as all of us progressives who call ourselves Democrats (or independents or Greens) don’t agree about everything. But we work in coalition, cooperating to challenge what we oppose and implement what we support. Tomorrow’s protests aren’t about agreeing on everything. They aren’t a statement that protests are the only or even most important aspect of our dissidence. They are a demonstration – a manifestation – that large numbers of Americans who have differences on other matters are united against this war and occupation and willing to show up and put up with the sacrifice of hearing a speaker or two whose views they can’t stomach.

Over many who oppose the war, particularly among those who have opposed it before it began, hangs a sense of despair and frustration and exhaustion because there still is no end of the nightmare in sight. As a veteran of hundreds of protests, vigils, and actions, let me say that I empathize. But, every protest is part theatre, part political pressure, part education and part energizing people to go back into their communities and keep working for the long haul.

As Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, told Alternet’s Tara Lohan:

"Some people are fed up with protests but are even more fed up with the war. ... We have few vehicles to express our opposition, and we need to use every one we have. We'll never know the lives we may have saved or the destruction we may have prevented that resulted from our previous anti-war protests. But I do know that the minute we stop, things will get worse."

Tomorrow isn't the be-all, end-all of efforts to end the war in Iraq and prevent the next war. It's just one important element.

Thanks to Kossack Got a Grip for putting together a list of actions and links to local organizers at Road2DC.com (You might also read Got a Grip's very fine September 10 Diary Don't Think Protests Matter? The Freepers Do...)

Here are the links to information for each protest:

Wilmington
Boston
Los Angeles
New Orleans
New York
Philadelphia
Salt Lake City
San Francisco
Orlando
Chicago
Jonesborough, Tennessee
San Francisco – Noe Valley

Seattle