Stop All This Protesting

October 5, 2011 Stop All This Protesting

There’s hundreds of people doing protests in New York City and even mock ones are starting to pop up across the United States, one of which I am apart of. There are legitimate reasons why we’re doing what we do. It’s not hard to see what’s happening. Before I became part of the actions of Occupy Baltimore, I was a part of the union busting protest in Wisconsin. Did you see the results? Yea, we didn’t win.  I worked my ass off organizing, marching, and chanting in Wisconsin and now Baltimore to make change. It’s the same formula: knock on a bunch of doors, convince people that they need to do this in order to change their surroundings, get them to come out to events, rally for about an hour and hope that some change is going to come. The only thing is, it hasn’t.

Besides a few union victories that I’ve been a part of (even some of those have been recalled), we haven’t won anything that has produced significant gains for the American people. All we’ve done is produced large amounts of people that come to a public place. Sure, you can argue that this creates awareness, some positive, some negative, but that’s about it on a checklist of things that brought us together. Every time I’m in a rally, I question our effectiveness. Is this group of one hundred people going to take us to the promised land? Even though our efforts in Wisconsin produced so much awareness and I’d even argue to say that public opinion was in our favor, the union busting bill was still passed. Wall Streeters sipped champagne while protesters camp out in front of their offices. In my opinion, the effectiveness of marches, protests, and people carrying hundreds of signs isn’t twitching that nerve in the people we’re rallying against that says “what I’m doing is wrong.” Spare the “who’s putting money in their pockets” arguments. Every one innately knows what’s wrong and what’s right.

What can be done to change this? We’ve become so “democratic” on the left that no one wants to draw the line in the sand, take leadership and make a list of demands. Or is it that we’ve become so dependent on the things that are provided from the ones we stand against? We can look at what is happening around the world and use that as inspiration but we also have to take into consideration that these nations weren’t democratic. I believe we need an old school attitude, with new school rules. We need people who can sit down on the inside with the necessary skills and change laws and policies. The marches, rallies, drum beating, and megaphone shouting hasn’t worked and won’t work until fire can be met with fire. I’m just tired of selling dreams to myself and to others.

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