I’ve seen my newsfeed full of people stating the protestors should “get a life”, “get a job”, “Stop being cry babies”. I hear these descriptions in every protest. Do you recognize yourself there?
People are mad at the results and fear for the direction we are now headed. It’s OK to be fearful. It’s a natural reaction to change and history has proven that sometimes, radical change is really bad. How many people were in fear that Sharia Law was going to be put in place by our “Muslim President” 8 years ago. How many feared that he was going to take guns away resulting in a surge of gun sales? For the last 8 years people have protested our current President. Some people even strung up effigies of the president hanging by a noose in trees and while that was over the line, protesting is quite normal.
The United States of America literally began over a protest. The Boston Tea Party to be exact and from there forward protesting has been a creative and useful way not to just be heard, but to actually effect change. The Woman’s Suffrage Movement was a protest that gained steam and earned women the right to vote today. The Civil Rights Movement was a protest that now affords many the Civil Liberties they enjoy today. We’ve had protests that have resulted in Judges stepping down or overturning a ruling. Protests have and hopefully, always will be, an important part of our future as it was of our past.
Do I agree with protesters destroying things; actually I do, when those things belong specifically to the person or company you are protesting such as the Boston Tea Party throwing that tea into the harbor in protest or disrupting business at a bank the participated in Mortgage Fraud. I don’t believe in just destroying property at will and most protestors don’t. When you carefully examine protesting today, you will see that the majority of protesters are just shouting. We have seen and heard of evidence where someone (and I’ll let the conspiracy theorists lose on who that someone is) employees people to incite violence or damage property. We know for a fact that this is a tactic used by governments to disrupt other governments so why not employee its use on home field? No, the majority of protestors just want to be heard and have no intention of destroying anything.
The main ingredient in any protest is disruption and yet it is this very disruption that bothers most of the people not involved in the protest even if they can personally align with the ideals of the protestors. Without disruption though, the protest would hold no weight, have no voices and nothing would change. Even our government protests and create some of the biggest disruptions in our lives. Congress has protested numerous things over my lifetime and each time they protest, they have shut down Federal Services like access to National Parks or distributing Social Security checks. Yes, Congress has enjoyed the benefits of protesting as well.
So as you sit here in the comfort of your home watching the world change around you and posting on the internet how these protestors are lazy, privileged leeches on our society; remember that they, not you, are the ones effecting change and given our history, I’d say that protestors are perhaps the most important patriotic members of our society because they believe in something so strongly that they disrupt their own lives for the sake of many. When was the last time you believed in something so strongly, you risked being beaten, sprayed with tear gas, shot and arrested to support that belief?
Take a look at some other historically significant protests around the world and how they changed the world. http://www.livescience.com/16153-10-significant-political-protests.html