Unfocused reflections on taking part in protest

Since I made a post a while back with some pre-emptory thoughts on this Christian Peace Witness for Iraq event that happened in the middle of March, I wanted to follow up with some retrospection.

And since Davis beat me to the topic with a prickly little rant about some protests in NYC that he read about last month, perhaps I can respond using his post as an entry point. He sums up well the persistent, tiring sense of disappointment that have underlaid my experience at both of the protests I've witnessed, one last September in which I was merely a man behind a camera, and this time as a participant. My immediate hesitancy to embrace these public marches has been certainly due to what Davis identifies as "theatricality," which is the right word for it. I think this is a direct result of reluctant acceptance on the part of protest organizers of the average American's "event reality" being highly mediated by, well, the media: If a tree falls on a mime in the forest, does it make a sound? Likewise, if 3,000 protesters march from the National Cathedral to the White House on a Friday night around midnight, if the president is at Camp David for the weekend and only a few hundred pedestrians witness the event and a handfull of newspapers carry the story--did it ever really happen? Well, in the awareness of most Americans, no, it never did.

So last September at the White House, there was a certain palpable tense expectancy on the part of the organizers... would Senator Jim McGovern actually show up and get arrested? Were lots of anti-war people going to gather from all over and turn this into a Big Deal that NBC couldn't ignore? Or would this party turn out to be for only 8 "independent news" cameras and the 15 endorsers of the document?

Apparently left at the mercy of the media, protesters attempt to creatively introduce various degrees of theatricality: Staging "die-ins" at senators' offices, pouring dyed blood into rivers, or some going so far as to collect their own blood and pour it on the interior of a military recruitment center. In the case of last September, a team of moderately well-known organization leaders marched up to the white house gates, claiming that they won't leave until President Bush meets with them and signs on to their troop-withdrawal terms. The anti-climax comes after 3 hours of sitting on the sidewalk singing old protest songs, when a bunch of police officers that have been standing around announce that everyone who doesn't leave right now is going to be arrested for creating a "safety hazard" by sitting on the sidewalk for too long. An edict which also happens to include one angry, party-crashing bystander on a soap box exposing her breasts with a sign reading "War Is Indecent."

Set against the immortalized drama of the 60s that those gingerly-sung songs reference--thousands of working-class leaving work to march for miles down the street singing spirituals while being provoked and attacked by police and heckled by crowds of pissed-off, status-quo-enforcing onlookers--it's quite a let-down. In fact, I think the prospect of marching against war with hundreds of old, earth-tone-clad, gentle liberals is exactly what drives all of those wild-n-crazy anarchist kids to gear up in militaristic black paraphernalia and strike out at cops whenever they organize enough to get out on the streets.

The reality of my experience with war protests is that the compromise (that utterly terrifying confrontation with The Mundane) that seems to inevitably result from any large-scale communal activity is something that an impatient idealist such as myself just has to get used to on some level. Of course, this is where I have to disagree with Davis, who writes off those NY die-in protesters as self-serving rebels without a cause. In fact, in my experience it's really hard to stay excited on rebellious sentiment when one is faced with almost completely uninterested/unphased audience. And the odd angry patriot shouting from a car. And finally the television-saturated pedestrian who is flabbergastedly documenting the event on a camera phone, startled, barely believing that he is witnessing something in person that one would usually see on television (hence the irresistible urge to commit the experience into a medium that will finally render it comprehensible).

On the contrary, I have a lot of respect for the tenacity of anyone who can hold on to their moral beliefs after glancing into the bored eyes of city-dweller after city-dweller, and finally a cop who can't wait for this technical exercise in zip-tie-ing limp bodies to be over... and then proceed do it again and again. Besides, most of the people I've seen get arrested are over the age of 50. Middle-finger-raisers? Not likely. Pietists? Perhaps, but then anyone who's acting out what they believe in is in danger of being a self-serving pietist. But for that matter, perhaps your average, apathetic couch-potato, watching the evening news and your latte-sipping i-banker, rushing off to work, could use just a trace of piety. I guess the attempt to rouse others from complete and utter apathy becomes the main goal of most contemporary protests in our neck of the woods.

Which brings me to March's Christian Witness for Peace event. Just about everyone I knew who went with me to D.C. had long-since worn through the enamor of their first glorious march. (We had to grit our teeth when someone quoted Martin Luther King Jr. saying that in order to be successful, nonviolent activists must exercise endless energy and creativity in their cause to effectively counter the ingrained momentum of years and years of belief in the redemptive value of violent force).

All that said, the worship service in the National Cathedral was one of the most moving services I've been to in quite a while, highlighted by beautiful music and a few wonderful speakers. It was encouraging to gather with several thousand other Christians, as Christians, to collectively mourn our government's careless, hasty militarism. As it has been pointed out before, the history of international military conflict is marked almost without exception by confident church endorsements on every side, so it's nice to see at least a small part of the American church developing a voice that is at least able call into question rote national allegiance. So while the march itself was more a simulation of civil disobedience than an effective tool for change, I chose to take the event for what it was--a symbolic gesture--and appreciate it for that.

Real galvanizing protest, such as what happened in the 60s around civil rights, takes a lot of built-up pressure as well as a widespread collective agreement, besides all of the top-down creativity. My own judgment about this messy situation in Iraq, along with that of many other people, would need to crystallize before we could all expect to see something both big and compelling enough to get the average American onto the streets. But judging by the conformity backlash we're currently experiencing, I'd say we've got some more time to sit and mull over our what it means to be an American, maybe 5 or 10 or 15 years and a few more catastrophes before a significant portion are ready to really freak out again. Until then, protest will probably continue to look like bland fringe activity to most of us.

But then again there's the small-scale dynamic stuff.

If you're interested, the following items represent the rather modest media footprint of the March event:
Some photos
Fox News 5 coverage (featuring a wildly-haired moment with Dimitri)
A compilation of all of the print coverage