grimrose_eilwynn: (Default)
[personal profile] grimrose_eilwynn
This is a very good video on the problem with modern protest movements:

http://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_how_the_internet_has_made_social_change_easy_to_organize_hard_to_win

The speaker claims that many (but not all) protest movements, thinking the Internet and social media are easy ways to organize, get lazy and forget to put in a lot of the hard work. This is not to say the people in the movements are unwilling to take risks; it just means they sacrifice interpersonal connections in favor of virtual connections. I would agree, and add in my own two cents worth.

At my first college, which was in a major city, I was approached by the Occupy Wall Street movement all the way back in 2011. I declined to join the movement. Why? Three main reasons.

First, they had no leader. They were all about "group connections" and "everyone having a say" and they thought having a leader was "too hierarchical." That's all well and good, but I'm sorry, movements need leaders. They need to have people willing to put in the time and effort and dedicate their whole lives to organizing the rest of the masses. Or otherwise...

There is no organization. And that's reason number two. I knew that Occupy Wall Street was against economic inequality, but beyond that, I had no idea what they wanted. They had no specific goals, no specific policies they wanted changed or repealed. They failed to build a platform.

Take the civil rights movement, for example. They went goal by goal. One of their goals was: they wanted Black people to be able to vote. That's simple and straightforward, and they were very vocal about it. If the civil rights movement had gone the way of Occupy Wall Street, they would have amounted to a bunch of poorly organized, leader-less, sometimes violent mobs going from place to place, shouting, "Give us our civil rights!"

I'm sorry, but that gets you nowhere.

Now let's talk about the violence for a minute. That moves us to reason number three. So many protest movements today, all they do is go around smashing up storefronts. "Ooh, let's smash the window at Wal-Mart and run away! That'll teach them!" Teach them what? What the fuck? You just ruined the economy in your own place of residence! That was some poor, small business owner's livelihood you just totaled!

So in the end, my statement is simple. I didn't join Occupy Wall Street because I didn't agree with how they were organized. I was unimpressed and disenchanted.

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Hopeless Dreamer

March 2016

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