I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret.
Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.
A protest is an invitation to a better world.
It’s a ceremony.
No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at.
More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is.
The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, Congress,etc.
The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.
If you win them, you win power at the box office and power to make positive change.
Everything else is a waste.
There are a few ways to get there:
1. Let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do.
2 Appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down.
Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement.
3. Dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum when you’re dressed in clean, presentable clothes.
They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.
4. Make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking.
5. Go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at dawn fresh and rested.
I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection.
It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically.
Nothing I thought of is particularly original.
It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s.
And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act.
The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this.
as a Californian who left my home state at 35, in disgust, in 2016 and still loves my country and wants to love that state, this was one of my favorite things I've ever read. Thank you so much for "getting it."
No matter how evil you Lefties are, it's always Trump's fault for making you do it and just so unfair that when you all BE YOURSELVES it happens to end badly for you.
Donald Trump isn't making you do squat. You choose to be what you are, and then Trump says "Yeah, I oppose that". And then he wins, because opposing your kind is the sane, ethical thing to do.
I think that flag waving guy voted Trumplican and is protesting against all this law and order shit - he didn't vote for that.
You only know a person is truly on the left (though they may not admit it) if the flag they wave is the flag that represents, "one nation ... indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Are you fucking serious with this limp dick take? Fascism is on the march and you’re wetting your bed over flags? While presuming to lecture the people who are actually trying to stand up to it for not having the right optics? Get fucked.
Why not get rid of the flags altogether? Flags are all about saying, ‘I’m a member of this club that you’re not a member of’. No wonder people get pissed off. Waving a foreign flag amongst potentially angry people with guns is never a good plan, of course, but what’s the point of waving an American flag in America? Planting one on the moon was sort of disgusting, but we all got the point …. but what’s the point of carrying one around LA? I mean, I know that people smoke a lot of weird stuff in California, but most of them still know what country they are in. Don’t they? Maybe since the election, now that I think about it, they may have cause to wonder, I suppose …..
But the point is that the people they are waving flags at and presumably accusing of being unAmerican are Americans too. And they are thinking the same thing in reverse. Shouldn’t the other team be waving American flags too? You know …. ‘My American flag is better than your American flag’?
And where do all these American flags come from, anyway? Do American flag shops pop up conveniently every time a protest gets rolling? Or do people bring them from home? Are they leftovers from an Olympic opening ceremony? Are they kept in the basement in the hope that some lucky housewife might be selected by Elon via an Instagram giveaway to plant one on Mars? Even if she has never yet even left her own country. People should bring their opinions, their fears, their ideas and their love to these events. Not their flags.
Zen priest, Peter Coyote, on protest:
—
I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret.
Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.
A protest is an invitation to a better world.
It’s a ceremony.
No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at.
More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is.
The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, Congress,etc.
The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.
If you win them, you win power at the box office and power to make positive change.
Everything else is a waste.
There are a few ways to get there:
1. Let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do.
2 Appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down.
Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement.
3. Dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum when you’re dressed in clean, presentable clothes.
They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.
4. Make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking.
5. Go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at dawn fresh and rested.
I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection.
It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically.
Nothing I thought of is particularly original.
It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s.
And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act.
The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this.
Wake up.
Vent at home.
In public practice discipline and self control.
It takes much more courage.
as a Californian who left my home state at 35, in disgust, in 2016 and still loves my country and wants to love that state, this was one of my favorite things I've ever read. Thank you so much for "getting it."
So right about the flags. Dems can’t even protest effectively.
No matter how evil you Lefties are, it's always Trump's fault for making you do it and just so unfair that when you all BE YOURSELVES it happens to end badly for you.
Donald Trump isn't making you do squat. You choose to be what you are, and then Trump says "Yeah, I oppose that". And then he wins, because opposing your kind is the sane, ethical thing to do.
I think that flag waving guy voted Trumplican and is protesting against all this law and order shit - he didn't vote for that.
You only know a person is truly on the left (though they may not admit it) if the flag they wave is the flag that represents, "one nation ... indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Are you fucking serious with this limp dick take? Fascism is on the march and you’re wetting your bed over flags? While presuming to lecture the people who are actually trying to stand up to it for not having the right optics? Get fucked.
Do you want to win or not?
Why not get rid of the flags altogether? Flags are all about saying, ‘I’m a member of this club that you’re not a member of’. No wonder people get pissed off. Waving a foreign flag amongst potentially angry people with guns is never a good plan, of course, but what’s the point of waving an American flag in America? Planting one on the moon was sort of disgusting, but we all got the point …. but what’s the point of carrying one around LA? I mean, I know that people smoke a lot of weird stuff in California, but most of them still know what country they are in. Don’t they? Maybe since the election, now that I think about it, they may have cause to wonder, I suppose …..
But the point is that the people they are waving flags at and presumably accusing of being unAmerican are Americans too. And they are thinking the same thing in reverse. Shouldn’t the other team be waving American flags too? You know …. ‘My American flag is better than your American flag’?
And where do all these American flags come from, anyway? Do American flag shops pop up conveniently every time a protest gets rolling? Or do people bring them from home? Are they leftovers from an Olympic opening ceremony? Are they kept in the basement in the hope that some lucky housewife might be selected by Elon via an Instagram giveaway to plant one on Mars? Even if she has never yet even left her own country. People should bring their opinions, their fears, their ideas and their love to these events. Not their flags.