Had to work, and was about in the middle of where the majority of marching and protesting happened during the day.
Seattle’s well practiced pro-labor organizers and advocates did another amazing job getting out people to give their platform a voice in their own marches and rallies. And well done for them.
This year though, and maybe it was just me, but it just seemed like a tipping point of protest tourist was hit. People going about bitching about capitalism, dressed head to toe in corporate brand clothing and accessories under their trendy mask. Maybe it is my aversion to the trend of virtue signaling by bandwagoning on the ‘important issues’ of the day with the minimal effort possible that is making me cynical towards most public protest that come off as mob whining that I now witness. But I find it a challenge to take seriously a protest, where there is no espousing a clear message understood by its supporters which they are trying to get public examination of, or that risk nothing and is only platitudes meant to make the participants fulfill some psychodrama of having confronted and stood up to ‘sinister forces’ of oppression with them as the rebels against the empire.
I am over simplifying it. However when I see someone sharing their video stream via an iPhone and commercial app as they are drinking a Starbucks, wearing high end fashion labels, and shouting about how the 1% corporate interest are oppressing them as the Seattle PD shepherd them along a predefined street route, I wanna run up and start playing them a video of ‘Tank Man’ after the Tiananmen Square protest from 1989, and say ‘No really, this is what oppression and standing up to it looks like, here.’ And then maybe start a dialogue about keeping shit in context, and not all things needing to be a matter of fighting evil, but more so can be failures of our meager and human made systems where through laziness, reactionary blindness, and just plain mistake in policy, unintentional consequences are harming many and need to be addressed calmly, and thoughtfully, outside political dogma. And least of all through the lenses of living out a hero fantasy of speaking truth to power.
