Market Street in San Francisco, 01-18-2003
August 25, 2007
What was it that occurred, precisely?
It was simultaneously such a success and such a failure — it couldn’t have looked more like a successful, classic protest in the public square. So many people, so many thousands of people, seeping into the city from all corners of the state. We believed in our own power, we were reminded of our sheer mass and volume. And we repeated the experiment, month after month after month, until we wearied and lagged.
In spite of its many successes — the catalyzing of morale, the creation of an awareness of our collectivity, the viscerally-perceived demonstration through massed bodies of our very existence as a significant, motivated, dissenting population — we failed to do what we believed at first we could do. At the outset, we believed we might stop the war from beginning.
And it was our very success in manifesting such awe-inspiring demonstrations that made our utter failure to be visible in the larger national discourse all the more glaring and chilling. We failed to make an impact on the nation that was proportional to what we had achieved in the streets of our own cities.
“Chilling” is such an apt word for the sensation I felt; perhaps it might also be described as a “sinking feeling.” The very clear discrepancy between our success in the actual public square and our success in the virtual one – it set many of us back on our heels. The experience undermined any whisper of faith we may have had that we were living in the kind of democracy in which the will of the people could not be ignored.
I think many of us felt compelled to “go back to the drawing board,” or at least to back away from full engagement with something we realized at last had become alien to our knowledge. What kind of animal was this political society? We’d all been trained, through the rhetoric of k-12 civics lessons to believe that “it was our own.” But the training in “how it worked” had obviously been based on obsolete specs.
This was four and a half years ago, now. Have we rested up? Is it time for the dormancy to be over? Do we know, now, something we didn’t know then about how to sneak up on the monster?
August 25, 2007 at 7:26 pm
And before that,
DC 2000
Seattle 1999
Almost literally everywhere on the planet in 1968.
Berkeley 1964
Cuba 1956-1958
China 1949
Russia 1917
Paris 1890s (Bohemia
Paris 1871 (Paris Commune)
Germany 1848
France 1789
England 1640s (Diggers)
Germany 1521 (Anabaptists)
Bohemia 1430s (Taborites)
Paris 1204-1312 (Brethren of The Free Spirit)
Lyon 1177 (Waldensians)
Languedoc (France) 1020-1240 (Cathars)
Ayrarat 990 (Tondrakians)
Bulgaria 927-969 (Bogomilism)
My knowledge of the trace ends there, not to be picked up again until Greece in year 0-200, and then of course there is the rest of the world…
All of the people above believed in love (relationships more than marriages), believed in some form of fundamental ontologically established equality, made moves to establish it in their fights, and they were all fought, all of them.
But this reads as a rising tide. So far, I really do think there was some kind of peak in May 68, even though by all structural accounts it accomplished nothing. Sometimes I think the only secret is to stop living in the virtual world and we will have discovered that we have already won. 68 is a short time from now, historically speaking. I think we’re ready to crest a wave higher than it has ever risen before.
August 29, 2007 at 11:41 am
You’re too pessimistic - the marches were successful, it just took time. Let me explain.
A successful protest should be repeated, and should involve a huge mass of people. Those marches had that right.
But to have been effective at the time, they needed to coincide with either the majority opinion or at least a sizeable minority. In early 2003, the march represented a small minority, although it’s easy to see why it didn’t feel that way standing in the streets of San Francisco. Had the marchers represented the majority in 2003, however, it still might not have had much effect with a Republican president and Republican congress, neither of whom was expecting anyone anti-war to vote for them anyway.
That said, it depends on how you define “effective”. Continuous protests on a smaller scale, letter-writing, and public comment (tv, especially pbs, documentaries, editorials, etc.) since then have, in fact, swayed public opinion and that’s changed the content of congress.
If huge protests were staged right now, with the majority opinion behind them, it would likely hurry up the process of withdrawal from Iraq.