Loachman said:
Mellian and Marlborough: What precisely do you (want to) protest against, anyway?
Modern (post
circa 1965) protests are a bad joke. They are, broadly, aimless and violent; they are media events,
only. Policy makers and political leaders are 100% shielded and equally (100%) disinterested; but they, politicians, do, every now and again, exploit protesters by co-opting them for a brief, insincere, chat and a photo op.
I understand that one group of international
officials has devised a bit of a joke equation that measures something like the population of the city where the meeting is being held divided by the number of protestors (police estimates, only) factored against the value of the property damage (measured in
constant US dollars) to arrive at a
national silliness quotient. The US, I’m told, is always the silliest country because everyone inflates their property damage claims and that skews the results, but the US officials revel in their
success and fight hard to defend the
honour.
Protests, mainly in the USA, in the 1950s and '60s
for free speech,
for fundamental civil rights,
for basic human equality were, in part, fuelled by rage against conservative, religiously based values and against overtly, officially sanctioned racism. But in the mid ‘60s, as the
boomers came of age they had nothing against which to rage. In North America,
Barney Rosset et al had won the freedom of speech battles and the civil rights battles
belonged to American Blacks. Those Blacks were, quickly, divided, by age. Older Black Americans, under Martin Luther King, preached and practiced non-violence; younger Blacks under people like Stokey Carmichael and others demanded a more confrontational, even violent response to institutionalized racism. The middle class white kids from the suburbs were excited by the civil rights violence but they needed a target: enter Viet Nam and Lyndon Johnson.
The rest, as they say, is history. The kids got their
cause and their violence; they keep at it today, even, especially when, as with the
G8 and WTO and
Summit of the Americas and the G20, they are abysmally ignorant of the issues at hand. Protests, in 21st century North America, including Ottawa in 2001, are
nothing more than an excuse for self indulged children to riot. They – the children - don’t
know why they’re screaming but screaming, rock throwing and window smashing attract cameras (more self indulgence) and it’s
Revolution For The Hell Of It.
That’s it: that’s why they want to demonstrate. They are really
protesting their own boring, pointless, idle lives.
