There is no zero-sum equation between contributing to a concrete cause and spending time and cash on a protest. People can do both. A major component of everything happening during the G8 is designed to get more people more involved in these issues day to day. There is far more to this particular event than marches and concerts, but even if there wasn’t, just those still serve to bring people more fully into the fold.
Still, it would be disingenous to say they’re independent. Yet if everyone who came to Edinburgh instead stayed home and gave their budget to charity and spent so many hours on good works? Surely, it would be a bonanza of positive outcomes – but even this impossible dream would be a drop in the bucket compared to the potential impact of downstream influence on public opinion and the G8 decisionmakers. Not even that.
Sandbrook said that the 1960s protests achieved little, but the world did change. There is now little support for nuclear power in Britain, the Vietnam war is well-understood to have been a moral and strategic disaster, and the Troubles have finally begun to end after a long series of iconic protests. The world did change. Sandbrook doesn’t understand what protests do.
I’m leaving the house in a few minutes. Off to be part of the speech as a population talks to itself.
[next: What the day was like!]
just returned from the protest, and as I have been following your posts on the G8 I thought I would share my own comments, and say we really ought to have conversations like that more often.
Cool. Who are you? No name came through…
Morgue wrote: “Surely, it would be a bonanza of positive outcomes – but even this impossible dream would be a drop in the bucket compared to the potential impact of downstream influence on public opinion and the G8 decisionmakers. Not even that.”
I don’t know that I agree here primarily because it hasn’t really been done before.
To change a culture you have to change the people. Perhaps going on a march brings about some change over and above the virtuous “I went on a march” buzz. But does it create concrete chnage in that the person will go about changing their life to better fit the ideals espoused on the march.
Personally I doubt it in 9 out of 10 cases.
I guess my beef here is that a protest march, in most cases is easy charity. I have more respect for those protesters in balck that got ring fenced by the police because they actually risked something.
Going on a generic march, or going to a feel good concert means that the person risks comparitivly little. But they can go home and feel like they’ve done something good by just tuyrning up and go on not noticing the crashing poverty and misery in their own back yard.
To think good thoughts and shout good slogans for the benefit of people you only see on TV may, and I say may because lots of protests have never achieved any change, achieve some long term change somewhere in the future.
Actually stepping out of your comfort zoe, really risking your time and energy to help someone *in person* _will_ change *you*.
If all the people that went on that march actually spent that time and energy and money helping people in thier own back yard I would stake my life on it changing them and doing more to bring around the kind of culture change you talk of that some long term nerfarious change somehwre in the future.
I could argue, in fact I will argue, that the changes that occurred that you talk about had little to do with the marches, and more to do with people actually changing their lives to live according to a new ideal.
A march *is* culture talking to itself. Personally I’d liek to see less talk and more action.
Rather than yelling at people who probably aren’t lustening try something hard. Change yourself. Live according to the polemic.
In case you ask I was in town on friday night actually trying to put this into practice in a very small way.
Some friends and I went and looked for ways we could help eachother. We all experienced real fear of doing this. Fear of rejection, fearof not being able to do enough, fear of getting involved.
But we went and did it anyway (and ran into Billy in the process – Hi Billy). I did a small thing, giving away chocolate to people who I thought would appreciate it (no one really *needed* it, but the goodwill it generated was what it was really about).
A no strings attached gift.
We’ll be doing it again on friday night.
This changes me. I took a step yesterday, overcame some fear. Next time I’ll look to do a little more. And so on.
I am not saying this to come across all holier-than-though, rather to document it.
Doing this *is* changing me. It is making me more community minded. It is challeneging my fear of my fellow man and my fear of myself. It is taking a stand for something I beleive in (like you and the tough guy on the bus). It is making me a better person, a little less selfish and a little more selfless.
And I hope, I really hope, that it is affecting the people that I cross paths with. That perhaps they will think a little outside themselves too.
You change a culture one person at a time. And the best place to start is with yourself.
Hmm…
Morgue, I have used a lot of “you” in what I have written. I mean it in the Royal sense, the royal you.
Mostly.
What happens once the people have changed? The structures have to change?
“If all the people that went on that march actually spent that time and energy and money helping people in their own back yard I would stake my life on it changing them and doing more to bring around the kind of culture change you talk of that some long term nerfarious change somehwre in the future.”
Like Morgue said ‘poverty is structural’. It can be demoralising to spend time, energy and money ‘helping’ people when you see the same people/problems/difficulties week after week, month after month, year after year. Sometimes the voluntary organisations set up to work in the community are just part of the structure, or a structure within the structure that allows poverty to exist. In my opinion, sometimes ‘helping’ people absolves governments from the responsibilities they have to make sure the strucures don’t cause problems; sometimes ‘helping’ people hides the true face and nature of the faults with the structure. Sometimes ‘helping’ people doesn’t help anyone at all.
I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t help people in our own backyard when we can. But maybe when we look back on this time we’ll see that the critical mass of people who said ‘this structure isn’t working’ was one of the most important catalysts for change.
Fair point Cal. I have been reflecting on what I have written in various replies to Morgues posts. Perhaps I have come out too strongly against the protest.
Let me be the first to say that I don’t think it is worthless to protest, my personal experience aside (having gone a number of seemingly worthless protests in my time).
Perhaps the protest did send a message, as you say. I hope it did. I really do.
Just to respond to one thing you said in particular:
“It can be demoralising to spend time, energy and money ‘helping’ people when you see the same people/problems/difficulties week after week, month after month, year after year. Sometimes the voluntary organisations set up to work in the community are just part of the structure, or a structure within the structure that allows poverty to exist. In my opinion, sometimes ‘helping’ people absolves governments from the responsibilities they have to make sure the strucures don’t cause problems; sometimes ‘helping’ people hides the true face and nature of the faults with the structure. Sometimes ‘helping’ people doesn’t help anyone at all.”
All of this is no doubt true. But none of it is an arguement for not helping. We cannot know all the long term consequences of helping people. But that is not an argument for not actually helping.
I could substitue protest into much of that paragraph and it would be equally true:
“It can be demoralising to spend time, energy and money protesting against injustice when you see the same people/problems/difficulties week after week, month after month, year after year.”
“Sometimes the voluntary organisations set up to protest against injustice in the community are just part of the structure, or a structure within the structure that allows poverty to exist.”
In fact Morgue quoted someone who suggested exactly this.
The truth is that we must try. We must make the attempt, whether it’s to protest or directly help (or, ideally both). Our actions may amount to nothing. We may see no change in our lifetime. Martin Luther King Jr didn’t see his dream realised, but he still lived his life striving for it.
I can take a leaf out of the bible here. Hebrews 11 talks abotu the ‘heros of faith”. People who struggled on, standing firm in their beleif when all evidence was against them. Personally I like the idea of Noah building a boat; in a desert! whether you believe the story is true or not it’s a great story telling of one man acting on his convictions.
I firmly beleive that belief must cause people to act, something I have said here before. I have no problems with people protesting, but the cynic in me thinks that most of the people will think that this is enough.
It’s not.
If they believe enough to protest shouldn’t they then find other ways to act on that beleif?
In my, albeit limited, experience protests have the opposite effect. They induce a kind of apathy. People think they have done their ‘good deed’ and now they don’t have to do anything else. It’s kind of like the placebo of political action.
I suppose in some ways that’s my biggest problem with this. 225,000 people marched. How many of them now are working towards continuing that positive action in more definite ways? Probably about 10% is my guess, and they are the people who would have done stuff anyway.
I hope I am wrong. I hope the protest places the kind of pressure on the powers that be that Morgue argues it will. I hope the protest is a catalyst for some kind of change down the track.
But it can never replace, in my mind at least, the value of direct action taken by people to help those around them.