Local Protests Divide More Than Unify

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I had a conversation once with a woman who used the fact that her daughter had been arrested for possession of mushrooms when she was 18 as a sort of bludgeon in arguments, bullying her daughter into a box of self-doubt and recrimination by telling her, “I’ve never been arrested in my life.” I remember saying, “have you even lived if you weren’t arrested in your late teens, early 20s, for a petty offense like vandalism, recreational drug use, or victimless act of destruction tied to a sociopolitical idea?” To this day, I wonder if it made her reevaluate her interactions with her daughter.

Some readers might disagree, but mixed emotions, irrationality, and ferocious, unsubstantiated passion are an entitlement of youth. Within safe parameters, those passions need to be allowed to rage. What they should not be allowed to do is influence global politics.

I guess that’s why it was so anguishing to have the scales ripped from my eyes over the last decade, to see that emotionalism and easy manipulability is not at all exclusive to the young. During Covid and the height of the BLM movement, I saw young adults (late high school, early college) at the vanguard of the protests, which often turned turbulent, even violent. I saw young adults armed by the media with the flame-gun of righteousness, burning to cinders anyone who dared contradict, or bring self-awareness to, their pure justice. None of that surprised me. What did surprise me was seeing them supported by the older generation.

But, why? How could people old enough to have lived through some of the greatest disasters and global shifts of the 20^th and 21^st centuries believe violence is justified, and align themselves with screaming children? The right to protest is the right of every American, and the obligation of every conscientious human being. However, I do not think these ICE protests are a good thing. Do not confuse what I’m saying with, “I think protests are a bad thing,” but I’m having trouble seeing these particular protests as anything but symptoms of a misguided ideology.

And before you say it, no, this isn’t because I’m pro- or anti-Trump. It’s about the concept of protests in general, and their merit when carried out performatively.

Protests are supposed to be the voice when a righteous cause has none, or is suppressed. This voice is designed to make as much noise as needed to reach the news stations, to force them to give this underrepresented problem coverage. The news conveys the issue to communities otherwise untouched by the issue. If the voice is powerful enough, these people can bring reform to the issue via communication with their politicians, financiers, and the elite with whom they intermingle. A protest should shake a tree so hard it shivers all the way to the top.

So imagine our confusion when the voice starts from the top, from the media itself. When the protestors are the very people a protest strives to reach. Where can a protest go when its primary aims were achieved before it ever began? 

Take to social media? Though the mainstream media is already shouting cardboard sign slogans from the rooftops, surely these unstructured platforms are woefully quiet.

Except, these mediums are, every single one of them, are already saturated almost monomaniacally with “ICE out” and “No Kings.”

Well, ok. If the structured and unstructured medias are already overabundant with the information you’re trying very hard to give a voice to, and it’s you that the voice strives to reach anyways, what purpose does the protest serve? Who exactly is the person protesting, and what do they hope to accomplish? 

Having spoken with a dozen or more, and having driven down High Street every week, it is, almost invariably, a person in their late-50s to early-70s, wealthy, retired, culturally and ideologically homogenous. 

I remember walking around Newburyport during the Black Lives Matter movement — now faded to a few vestigial bumper stickers and a fuzzy, frustrating memory — back when every house in Newburyport had a BLM sign in their window. While walking around, it took a lot of self-restraint for me not to leave a note at these houses that said: “If you really care about this cause, sell your million-dollar home, give half to the cause, buy a cozy half-million dollar house in Amesbury or Haverhill and live no less comfortably.”

A friend asked me: So does that mean rich people aren’t allowed to hang a sign, or to protest? Of course not. But I think they should have a mirror held up to them. Pretty much everyone in this city enjoys a certain degree of prosperity.  Even the guy playing drums on overturned 5-gallon buckets lives in a literal mansion. These same people who taped the BLM signs to their fences have never protested a crisis in their lives beyond the crises that were delivered to their televisions, consolidated and packaged for easy, thoughtless consumption. Then, as though overnight, they faded out with Twilight Zone-esque choreography.

I believe that the wealthy, sheltered, big hearted (I mean that genuinely) folks of Newburyport bear a greater burden of responsibility to all the rest of the world. If you’re going to champion a cause which you perfervidly emphasize as a cause of dire need and immediate threat to all of democracy, do something about it. Buying a sign is not doing something. It’s laziness.

To be clear: Fuck Trump. Fuck Kamala. Fuck Bush. Fuck Biden. Fuck Hillary. This isn’t about party politics, this is about the reality that we are a global human community. I know I sound like a hippy. Like you were once, maybe.

All I’m saying is, don’t jump off the bridge your friends are leaping from without investigating their call to leap. You are the people that the poor, the young, the uninitiated look to for change. Waving signs on the side of the road is the most egregious disappointment of that responsibility. The government needs you to forget that the court of public opinion rules, and as long as you’re divided, the jury will always be out. Examine the source of your righteous anger and you’ll find it never came from your neighbor. It came from the light your newscaster framed him/her in. You’ll never achieve the change you want holding a sign on the side of the road.

All the protesting has achieved is to widen the gap between parties, and broadcast to the world that not only are we disunified as a national community, but we can’t resolve it in-house and we desperately want everyone to know it. I’m not saying Trump and ICE aren’t a problem. But I’m saying your mission is already accomplished, and the news channels are using you to sow instability, and stir the pot of inner community conflict. I’m also saying something along the lines of:  Trump is the monster YOU made.  

I hope you enjoyed this article, that it pissed you off, that it was thought provoking and fodder for real conversation. 

P. Neverette
Rowley resident

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