Marches for change or good way to get rid of poster board?

Liese Schneider

Marches for change or good way to get rid of poster board?

Protests are meant to engage a larger, and maybe more complacent, part of a community in a cause. It's the simplest form of grassroots organizing. You're pissed off about something so you get a bunch of other people who are pissed off and you go to where the powers-that-be are, and you let them know y'all are pissed off. This is has been happening at NYU over the last couple of weeks.

I attended my share of protests in college, mostly in my enviro-defender suit, and they never left me satisfied. In fact, they made me feel isolated from the general public --and they definitely didn't stop the rollbacks. If we were lucky, we got a shout-out in the college paper. It felt like our protests were not accomplishing a large programmatic mission but served merely to flip the bird in the general direction of 'the man'.

My participation in the RNC protests and the UFPJ protests in February felt more like participating in my progressive civic duty rather then creating change. I was carrying on the mission my parents started in the 60's and I wouldn't let them down. But after my experiences in college, I became an only-big-and-important protest go-er.

In no way do I mean to liken my 12 person protest at the local gas station to the very real and important alliance these grad students are fighting to uphold. But, as a wise person once said, questioning tactics is always good. As a true believer in grassroots activism, I still have questions about their usefulness in modern day political action.

I think most would argue that protests have larger affects on smaller communities, i.e. students protesting bad university policy. But where do they fit in in the national debate? There was a surge of protests as the war started to escalate and in some of the country's liberal bastions you can still find that 7 person protest which makes you feel equally guilty and sympathetic. But the protests around the world have done little to reverse the policy of the Bush Administration to go into Iraq, not to mention, woman across the country are still in jeopardy of loosing the right to choose (maybe).

I wish the NYU grad students all the best but I wonder how else we (or they) could be organizing to enact some real change?

Liese Schneider: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 7:00 AM, Dec 06, 2005 in Progressives
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Protests are one thing, a strike is another. The graduate assistants at NYU are on strike.

I have not been following union politics at NYU since I stopped teaching there a few years ago (I was an adjunct at Gallatin for several years) and I don't think I can say much about what the UAW could or should be doing to improve academic working conditions (and student learning conditions) on a larger scale, but if the issue is a contract and negotiation hasn't worked, a strike really does embarass the university, disrupt operations and, at a minimum, make the point that NYU does rely on Graduate Student Instructors.

The big rallies at NYU are a way to demonstrate community support for the strike. They're not the only thing going on--just the most visible thing and one of the main ways that people outside the immediate struggle can participate. Another way to provide support is to write to NYU administrators urging them to bargain fairly. It's easy to do at http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/NYU_Action_clone

Posted by: NYU works because they do | December 7, 2005 11:18 AM

This is a little off from the NYU topic, but I think the question of where protests fit in the national debate is an excellent one.

One thing to keep in mind is that creating national-level change takes time. One demonstration may not seem to change anything. Ten demonstrations may not seem to change anything. But over time, broad public opinion begins to shift and the decisions made by our national leaders are affected in ways that may not be immediately apparent.

For example, take the Vietnam war. Nixon always claimed he was not influenced by the antiwar movement and made a public show of being absorbed in a Washington Redskins game during the largest antiwar demonstration in DC. But recently declassified tapes and documents show that Nixon was extremely concerned about the rising tide of demonstrations and they influenced him not to follow through on plans to drop a nuclear bomb on Vietnam, as well as the decision not to pursue the secret war in Cambodia further than he did.

Along those lines, I wouldn't rule out the impact of protests against the War in Iraq or for reproductive freedom. We may have to wait a few decades to discover whether we'd have troops on the ground in Iran right now if people weren't protesting the Iraq war so visibly.

Protest is important because it's a way that we can express our dissatisfaction with a situation while attracting attention to the issue, and I've marched in my fair share. Though it is an important form of expression, I sometimes worry that it does more harm than good for whatever cause it is supposed to be benefiting.

Media coverage of the Vietnam was far more graphic and honest than the media coverage of Iraq and that was a major factor in shifting public opinion against the Vietnam War. People who watched coverage of the protests at home could see the reasoning for it because they were also seeing what was going on in Vietnam, while this is not necessarily true of Iraq. I think that public perception of protesters has changed and that people who aren't aware of everything that is going on are having trouble seeing the cause for anti-war protests today. The media coverage is so well spun now that people who watch them on television somehow get the impression that protesters are against the troops, "un-American", or are otherwise non-credible. I question whether the initial anti-war protests helped Bush by showing his base how much he needed their support.

I agree that it will be very interesting in the future to see what affect protests have had on this administration. I'd be especially interested in finding out if they ever welcomed the protests to bolster their own argument or if their concern increased over time as media coverage became more critical.