I hadn’t planned to go to the anti-war United for Peace and Justice March in Washington yesterday until a friend offered me a ticket on a bus earlier this week. That the March wasn’t even on my radar until last week is probably a sign of how far out of the activist loop I’ve fallen. It may also be a sign of the bare-bones planning that went in to this particular UFPJ event, but that’s just my speculation.
I grew up going to anti-war protests and I still recognize that they can be powerful statements of mass dissent. There are also elements of revelry, of spontaneous community creation, that I think people find really sustaining and exciting (What has been written about protest and revelry? Anything interesting?) They also, more so historically than now, were once powerful things to behold on TV news, especially if the news also relayed police brutality: not only were there lots of people marching in solidarity, but suddenly nonviolent protestors were getting water cannoned and mauled by police dogs.
But big marches also suck in so many ways. They’re incredibly draining financially both for sponsoring organizations (UFPJ was begging for money as the March was wrapping up), and for local groups who have to figure out how to haul ass to DC or New York. Having access to resources ultimately determines whether or not people show up, and I’ve only ever been to one big anti-war march that wasn’t predominantly white and stunningly grey haired, and that was the April 2002 A.N.S.W.E.R march in DC. (The presence of so many Arab Muslims was absolutely amazing, but the conflation of anti-war dissent and anti-Occupation dissent was confusing and (for me) unexpected. Feeling like I had shepherded a 150 people into a rally they didn’t sign up for put me off serious organizing for a long time.)
Marches are also marginally popular among young people. I feel like I saw a lot of young people yesterday, but maybe that’s reflective of who I was hanging out with. I briefly talked with two older folks on the bus on the way home, and both wanted to know how many young people I thought there were and why there weren’t more. There’s a similar article in yesterday’s Inquirer about the generation gap at anti-war events that, though it acknowledges both the lack of a military draft and possible disenchantment with Baby Boomer protest tactics, more or less ends on a note of “Where are all the young people!? Don’t they care? They are the future!”
I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of this kind tone wherever I encounter it (it crops up with Quakers too), because it’s often really a thinly veiled “Ya’ll better get your act together and take up this torch.” Often the unacknowledged subtext is “Because we’re getting really damned tired.”
Maybe it’s a sign of my youthfulness, but I resent being told to get my act together, especially if I’m being asked to integrate myself in paradigm and practice I didn’t have a big role in developing. And though being damned tired is totally reasonable, I would prefer being told that I had I to carry on the anti-war work in whatever way I say fit, and that marching was just one option that has worked in the past.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for Boomer organizers who have lived through Viet Nam and the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, and 1990’s wars in the Middle East. But I’m finding increasingly that large marches and witness activism on their own, though incredibly powerful, aren’t enough for me and don’t satisfy. As a part of a larger culture of resistance though, I’m ok with them.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to build a larger culture of resistance, especially one that goes beyond consumption-as-political statement (look! sweatshop-free clothing! local food!), but encompasses it as well. The Inquirer article quoted somebody my age expressing a similar sentiment, and she gave one lame example of other kinds of activism her and her peers use: party crashing online conservative chat rooms. Not engaging conservatives in dialogue, but logging on en masse to their chat rooms and taking over the conversation (and probably inspiring all the conservative chatters to …log off. How radical). It does use technology as the monkey wrench though, and I think that's a step in the right direction.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a little stumped for other ideas. I’ve always liked the idea of culture jamming, a la Adbusters, in which you modify pre-existing media messages or outlets in such a way as to shock people out of their day-to-day routines. I think media plays a large role in our passivity, particularly in the passivity of my generation, and I've always day dreamed about culture jamming a news broadcast (Let me know if you have any ideas). I also think it's important to note that this big UFPJ march proceeded a day of lobbying in Washington. And I heard a lot of savvy people talking about how they frequently lobby their local elected representatives. I'd be interested to know how many people stayed for the lobbying.
Another step in a good direction would be to focus on building anti-war bridges across traditional racial and class barriers. I'm sure some of this happened, but wouldn't it be radical if the local Quaker Meeting called up the local AME church and said "Yo, you want to have a vigil? Then we'll go bang on Rep. So-and-So's door until she lets us in. Then maybe we can think about the getting military recruiters out of the local high school." That's the kind of activism I want to be a part of.
