RE: My response to ECOTRAIN QOTW 10.7
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They are negotiated spaces. Protestors gather in the same place every time, march down the same street and then collect en-masse in front of Parliament House for a maximum of two hours, after which we all move on peacefully. It is held at a time when the minimum number of businesses are inconvenienced and many even take advantage of the extra foot traffic. Ministers are usually long gone before it all starts and all we protest to are cleaners and security guards. It inconveniences nobody and achieves very little.
As most of the protesters are busy making money on the other days, they can only make the days when the politicians are also off work. 😉 Then of course the reason our protests are always peaceful is because we negotiate them and get permission, so we haven't had the same issues that Victoria, for example, has had. Have those protests made any difference for being unsanctioned and violent at times? No more so than Adelaide's have, by the look of it.
I have to wonder if activism of this type makes much difference at all, whether it inconveniences or not. If you aren't inconveniencing you're probably preaching to the converted anyway and if you are inconveniencing, you're turning people off your cause before you can educate about it.
Really, the people who need to be inconvenienced for anything to happen are those in positions of authority, not the general public. Education goes much further if it's the opinion of the public you need to change. Unfortunately, it often takes time for change to happen that way; generations, usually.
Activism is always useful, even if it only connects people who are already in the loop. Contemporary protest has to shift to new techniques of action, mass marches are easy to dismiss and rarely have any momentum. The most effective protest here in Adelaide was when XR blocked off Hindley Street and did the Madison in short spurts, letting the traffic move every few minutes. If I remember rightly, the larger crowd on the day moved down the Mall and gathered at the Rundle Street end for a few minutes. that few minutes was more effective than the King William Street part because it was a new place and a new technique. It received a far better response than the main march and myself and fellow activists positively engaged with more people in that 30 minutes than we engaged with during our PR works during the King William/parliament House portion.
We have to get people to be aware of issues first before education is useful otherwise, it is just absorbed into the background hum. At present we don't have the time for generational timeframes. The biggest social changes from the shifts in global economics will be washing over us by 2030 by all good estimates. By that time the world economy will be a different east from the one we know now. The climate will have shifted so much by 2050 that population spread will be very different too. Back in 2014, the World Bank started indemnifying itself against a 4 degree rise in temperature. Whatever the US government think of it all, the US military are working against a 2050 timeframe to secure bases against their predicted changes to the world and the resultant effects on US security infrastructure. other governments are following suite. 28 years is about 1 generation in the best of conditions but this one could be the last generation of many societies.
2030 is only eight years away. Education campaigns have failed over the last 30 years and politicians only take notice when their constituents look like they're not going to keep them in power. Change has to be rapid occur from many, many different networks of action. There isn't enough time for passive approaches alone any more and the only generational change we face could very well be extinction.
Shout, scream, irritate, inconvenience, bug, pester, demonstrate, write, sing, hug and love. We've got to do it all.
These will have been the receptive ones and I'm guessing you weren't exactly inconveniencing them at this point. This is the way to do it. When you inconvenience, you get people's backs up and they switch off to the message. In some cases they can even turn against the cause when they previously supported it because they begin to feel like people are going too far and causing harm or even feel personally attacked. I've actually seen this happen a lot lately with those who were once sympathetic, but now feel under attack.
You need to make sure you are doing it to the right people, though. If you take a blanket approach, then you're covering your would be allies too and they don't need or want to be shouted or screamed at, inconvenienced, bugged or pestered for something they are already doing their best with.
While I was writing my reply to your comment, I was struck dumb by the ludicrousness of the conversation and the original post.
According to the best stats, the best science and gazillions of observable phenomena, we are facing with, if not a cluster of extinction level events, a series of disasters that will kill millions and, reshape our whole society and redesign the stage upon which we act.
And we're arguing about whether it's right to 'inconvenience' someone.
Lol! And we wonder why people just switch off to surrounding events beyond their control and just get on with life. When it comes down to it, living out best lives without harming others can as much as possible just makes the most sense. Our time here is fleeting after all.
Still, it can be helpful to have these chats, it stops us getting too caught up in our tunnel vision. I rather like that I can have these discussions with you where we may not agree, but can still get a good debate without it getting nasty.
Agreed. Debate is far better than argument and I think we both respect each other enough in real life not to get bogged down in straight up arguing. If we had all started living the best we could without hurting others centuries ago, all would be good but sadly, that hasn't been the case and here we are, many of us living in a way that hurts not only others but ourselves and our future selves too.
Unfortunately we can't control what happened centuries ago, only what we do now. Unless you're also working on a time machine in your workshop. 😏 It may be too little too late, but I feel like the 60s/70s hippy movement started a ball rolling to the point where most people now are certainly more aware of problems with the damage we've caused and more receptive to conversation about it.