More than a thousand protests are planned across the US this Saturday and Sunday after ICE agents shot three people, one fatally, in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, this week.
"This weekend, people all over are coming together not just to mourn the lives lost to ICE violence, but to confront a pattern of harm that has torn families apart and terrorized our communities,” said Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible, an organizer of “ICE Out for Good Weekend of Action”.
For the ICE Out for Good weekend of action, events are planned in every corner of every state, from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, to Machias in eastern Maine. Indivisible, one of the groups behind last year’s No Kings protests, is continuously updating its online tracker to note every vigil, rally and protest. Other coordinating groups include the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the 50501 movement.
“We demand justice for Renee, ICE out of our communities and action from our elected leaders,” said Greenberg. “Enough is enough.”
I hope they will be effective
Protests are already effective, in multiple ways.
Mainstream media loves to “both sides the same” and minimize every new excess and unlawful act, making all of us feel very, very alone when we learn of the newest outrage in the silence of looking at our phones. Yet possibly the biggest thing attending a protest will do for anyone who goes is powerfully prove that they are NOT alone in their grief and outrage, that they are NOT crazy or misguided for thinking that which is blatantly wrong is, in fact, blatantly fucking wrong, that there really is still such a thing as community after living for so long in their own personal desert, even as the protest itself allows opportunities for making contacts with other like-minded people, offering inspiration that tomorrow need not feel as bleak as today.
It’s no accident that the biggest assault of regimes who aspire to totalitarian rule is on community itself, from every possible direction: propaganda, sowing discord, pitting in-groups against out-groups, normalizing antisocial behavior, criminalizing assembly, raising the specter of surveillance, fostering self-censoring, using public words to mindfuck and lie and call every evil The New Good, etc. They attack community in all its organic, non-supervised, non-approved forms wherever they can because to be human is to have an inbuilt desire for community: control the community and you control the human.
Yet in a single afternoon, attending even one protest can destroy all that carefully plotted work to cognitively and emotionally separate you from the rest of humanity, and worse still, pull in others to your cause that were otherwise happy sitting on the fence.
It’s not all about regime change, though it is certainly that. It is about building community that won’t stand for a shitty regime, one person at a time. And in that respect it is already overwhelmingly effective, for everyone that can attend even just one.
You’re perfectly right and this is why I hope they will be effective. They will have to be more massive than the propaganda campaigns that will follow so that, instead of being dampened and cancelled out by the media, they can create an avalanche effect that makes life difficult for colluding oligarchs and bureaucrats.
Yes, and you raise an interesting side effect of protests I hadn’t considered when I wrote. When you actually go to a protest yourself, you feel the camaraderie and energy in the air, you hear the supportive honks, you see the signs and the smiles and the tears on cheeks and the real passion of the strangers around you, all feeling the same way, all different in their own ways but really just wanting the same things you do for yourself.
And then after you get home and you see with refreshed eyes exactly how that protest you just attended was downplayed and misrepresented and undercounted in the media, the complicit media never again gets to “both sides” you as effectively as they did before.
Media narratives just doesn’t matter like they did, because now you know they lie, and lie a lot. You’ve been there. You’ve seen what others believe with your own eyes and heard it with your own ears and felt it deep down, in even the most cynical parts of your soul, how there really is resistance, there really is the possibility of righting this if you all band together, and you realize you’re part of a much bigger group than you ever knew you were. After that the media has to work vastly harder to take that new understanding away from you and make you feel isolated again, if they even can.
This alone, the immunizing effect that attending a protest has against further media manipulation, is another reason protests are just so important. Everyone who goes now knows for a fact, with the evidence of their own eyes, that mainstream media is complicit, and lies, which in turn creates more challenging voices in rebuttal wherever people do have a voice, like here.
Sir,I wish there were more people like you living on this planet
There are SO many of us. We just don’t get talked about. And some of us will even be on the streets today. ✌️ & ❤️
They will be, but not in an instant gratification manner.
Sociopolitical change requires the long haul.
Anyone expecting some kind of revolution needs to see about 35 million in the streets at once, plus a well developed infrastructure of philosophy, ideals, and civil organizations.
In the meantime, mass dissent is necessary and fertilizes the roots of liberty – cf. history.
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