I remember participating in a mock-rally protesting a local concert by Rick Astley. That was probably in 1990 while I was in university. That was also about the time that I started thinking that protesting is pretty pointless.
Last month I happened to be in downtown Ottawa during a Pro-life rally. I arrived late. I must have passed by more than 10,000 people (though I’m terrible at estimating such things) marching down Elgin Street, apparently after having attended the rally on Parliament Hill. By the time I got there, a scant 1,000 or so (again, I’m terrible at estimating such things) people gathered around a speaker. I sat and watched for a few minutes as the speaker described the horrors of abortion and introduced several women who had regretted having abortions. It all sounded, frankly, horrible. I couldn’t listen very long as I was there attending a field trip from my son’s school. I’m sure that I was one of maybe a few dozen people who weren’t there specifically for the rally, but still managed to experience it in some very small way.
I can’t help but wonder though… who got the message? The people who purposefully attended the rally were–I suspect–already “Pro-Life”. I’m pretty sure that neither the house nor the senate was in session on that particular day. I’m not sure if any members of parliament participated in the rally: maybe some did. But did it invigorate any of them to push for real change? What about the people on Elgin Street? How many of them were forced into deep reflection of their own views as 10,000 (or so) people walked past with placards featuring various Pro-Life slogans? I didn’t see even a 15-second bit on the news that evening (and I’m pretty sure that there was nothing on any of the major news websites; I could be wrong).
FWIW, I have purposefully avoided including my own views on this particular topic as I don’t think that my views on abortion are germane to this discussion
So what’s the point? Thousands of people who share a similar view on a particular topic gather together on the hill and rant to each other about the injustice, and nobody else cares. Or really even knows that it’s happening.
This all leads me to the conclusion that rallies as a means of changing public awareness and policy is a dead form.
Maybe this explains some of the violence in Toronto during the G20 meetings. Could the vandalism be a symptom of frustration that gathering together to try and force change is pointless? I heard many people complain that the vandals took the news cameras away from the “real protesters”; that vandalism itself became the story instead of the real issues that people took to the streets to shed light on.
But seriously, would those “real protesters” have been heard anyway?
The Four Amigos 
The actions on the streets of Toronto have made me consider the possibility of something I previously would have considered ludicrous: Agent Provocateurs. Canada already has gone on record that they have used them in the past.
The initial wave of violence assured that the peaceful protests would not be heard. It also seemed to give the police carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to those peaceful protesters.
Regardless, to say that there is no point in protesting because nobody listens is wrong, in my opinion. Between elections, it is literally the only way for people who are usually left voiceless to make themselves heard. (And some would argue that saying ‘between elections’ gives too much credit to elections, where very few people get their voices heard anyway.)
If you refuse to speak up against injustice, you deserve to face that injustice.
I’m not suggesting that we should refuse to speak up. I am suggesting that thousands of people shouting in the streets (peacefully or otherwise) has near-zero effect on policy makers.
I agree that it has a near-zero DIRECT effect on policy makers, but the indirect effects count too. If they can convince more of the general public that their cause in just, maybe there will be more pressure on those policy makers… especially at election time.
However, the underhanded tactics by the government combined with the sensationalist practices by the mainstream media make this pretty hard.
We should be glad that there are more and more ways to get the message without counting on CTV (or whoever…)
I don’t buy it. My sense is that the indirect effect is effectively zero. Perhaps even negative.
For the purposes of my own education, what “underhanded tactics” did our government engage in this past weekend?
They ‘snuck through’ legislation that gave police the right to demand to see i.d. from anyone within a certain distance from the fence. (I say snuck through because it was not publicized at all. People didn’t find out until after it happened). That gave the police the right to harass people simply for being downtown. Sometimes that meant people standing outside of their homes.
Secondly, there have already been documented cases of the government using Agent Provocateurs to escalate activities within a protest. It happened at Montabello and eventually the police even admitted it (I mean, they were caught red-handed… what else were they goign to do). This was a case of certain members of an otherwise peaceful protest getting in the face of the police and being hauled away. The people who were the instigators were ALSO police. There is no reason to do that unless you are TRYING to incite the mob to violence.
Here for the G20, when there WAS violence, the police stepped aside and let it happen. That ensured that all the coverage for the protests would be negative. When there were peaceful protests (the kind that could get POSITIVE coverage) the protesters were harassed, detained, attempts at dispersal and then assaulted.
I do not believe for a second that the police are so completely incompetent that they cannot tell the difference between violent and non-violent protests, yet their actions prove otherwise. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that they were manipulating the public and the media to their own ends. Were they using Agent Provocateurs? Maybe, maybe not, but they sure took full advantage of the initial violence to ensure that the peaceful protests were never heard.