I’m going to throw this out there because I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately and I think it’s an important thing to bring into our organizational conversations more often. I’m not going to the Women’s March.
I do not typically go to march style protests at all, really. It’s not my form of activism, I’m not good at it, I don’t like it, and I’m not useful there. And I know lots of people who also feel this way.
My protest is here. In this space. This is where I can make change, and this is where I excel at participating with a growing movement of folks who want to fight for our rights in a variety of different ways. I personally feel more effective with protest posters on the front of my house to use as talking points with neighbors than I do holding them next to people who already agree with me at a march.
I don’t hold ill will toward protesting in a “let’s gather with signs,” type fashion. Some of this simply comes down to personal style. So please by all means – if you are a protest person GO TO THE PROTESTS and get all psyched up and draw new people into the work and whatnot.
But I still think it’s important to remember and center the perspectives of people who don’t go to them, and understand why. There is such a diverse set of reasons that folks might not be willing or able to go, and I think it’s valuable to know what those are in order to bring more effective messaging into those protest spaces and to the progressive movement overall.
Also, let’s collectively remember that that the purpose of those marches is to get people **organized** not to serve directly as a solution.
Viewing marches as the end goal, the ultimate action, the only thing we do, the magical solution we can attend, check off our list, then putter back to our comfy daily lives as consumers – Doesn’t that kind of tie back into how we view systemic change as someone else’s responsibility? How we as individuals give our power freely in many cases by refusing to acknowledge our individual complacency in the systems?
My personal philosophy is not rooted in having good policy that protects us, or that we can simply tell our reps to protect us better – in reality, for most people across most of time and space, political power has not been protective. Crappy reps aren’t going to listen to us no matter how many show up to a march. We have to show up to the school board meetings and the legislature and the all the other spaces directly to change who is in those seats writing those terrible policies in the first place.
So yea. I just don’t like protests. They don’t resonate with me because they don’t align with my personal flavor of activism. And that doesn’t mean you’re bad if it does resonate with you (that’s a whole other post about false binaries right there), it just doesn’t resonate with me.
And that’s….totally fine. I don’t write this to make anyone feel bad, I write it because critical thinking and clear communication are sorely lacking in our modern culture and I feel like we can learn from each other by talking through our perspectives (what a wild idea in the year of our lord 2025 right?!)
Oh. Also. Last personal thought.
I simply CANNOT do large groups of spontaneously gathered humans that I don’t know. I don’t do that very well. My ADHD / Anxiety / school shooting survivor lizard brain says no. From an accessibility standpoint, I think we as communities should exercise caution in how we promote these type of events as a litmus test for progressive action.
There are no singular actions that get you “in” to the change making game. That’s a lifelong journey and we all do it in different ways and sometimes are different ways even counteract each other and that’s just kind of the reality of simultaneous truths and a really complicated world full of lots of really complicated people.
Anywho – that’s my thoughts. Please continue organizing rallies and sharing them online and doing all the things because that’s totally fine. They can be an effective organizing tool for lots of people. You don’t need permission or validation from me or from anyone else to do those things.
But I’m just…. not going.
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Reflection Questions:
- How does a suburban culture founded on whiteness and consumerism as cultural constructs relate to how we interact with marches and rallies?
- How can we make space for the duality of marches being an organizational and empowerment tool but also not a singular end goal in how we talk about them?
- What ways can we bring protest into the suburbs, as opposed to viewing them as events to attend outside suburbia?