Taking A Stand: Collective Action Is The Ticket To Freedom
Freedom isn’t really freedom if it only belongs to a few
Public protest is annoying.
Crowds of people jamming traffic, marching in the streets with signs held aloft, punching the air, and chanting slogans to catch the attention of fellow citizens out for a stroll.
They’re impossible to ignore; they’re disruptive, loud, garish, and eye-catching. Sometimes they’re actively obstructing your path, blocking roads, and chaining themselves to objects to prevent their removal.
Some even glue themselves to famous works of art to make a point — when they’re not throwing cans of paint on them, or dousing them with cans of tomato soup.
Judgemental glowers, anger, righteous indignation. They range from genuine and heartfelt demands for accountability and justice, all the way to crackpot conspiracy theories and anti-science nonsense.
Whether we agree with the goals of the protestors or not, we the people will always be the ones most directly inconvenienced by public demonstrations. They’re aimed at the people in power, but we all get caught in the crossfire.
There’s nothing more obnoxious than a public protest.
But have you ever stopped to think what life would look like without them?
The world used to be a very different place. There have always been rules, but they haven’t always been the same as we have now.
We take a lot of things for granted these days.
Weekends
Kids going to school instead of working full-time
Overtime pay
Compensation for injuries on the job
Basic worker safety regulations
Being paid for our work with actual currency that we can use in any store
Being allowed to marry the person we love, even as a same-sex or interracial couple
Without the right to protest, without collective action, we’d have none of those things.
It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? Once upon a time, you couldn’t count on these very basic rights that we consider the staple elements of daily life.
You could work 12 hours in a row, 6 days a week, with no protective gear or training and no expectation that you wouldn’t be fired while healing from a workplace injury. You could be living in a company town, being paid in vouchers that only buy you things provided by the corporation you worked for.
You couldn’t legally be in a relationship with the person you love, not if they’re the same sex as you. For quite a while, you couldn’t be married to somebody if they were of a different ethnicity than yourself.
The only reason these things changed? Angry mobs were rightly fed up. Activists were riled up enough to go to the public, spread the word, and drum up popular support. They built an army out of their fellow citizens.
They collectively stood up to their government, dug in their heels, and refused to take no for an answer.
The thing is, the rights we have now are rights that were hard-won. Every single regulation and guaranteed right was written in the blood of the people who stepped up to the plate and fought for a better future.
And with the stroke of a pen, those rights can be taken away.
The right to bodily autonomy is already being stripped away in the United States. Roe vs Wade has been taken down, stripping people with uteruses of their right to make medical decisions for themselves. At the same time, basic protections for transgender people are under assault.
The right to self-expression ought to be sacrosanct. Here I was thinking that we’d learned this lesson with Stonewall. The three-article rule really doesn’t need to make a comeback.
Here in Canada, our politics follow in lockstep with the United States. As anti-LGBTQ+ hate rises, our politicians and leaders have begun to take advantage. Pushing laws that target our vulnerable populations is considered a winning strategy these days, as despicable as it is.
Worst still, in some countries around the world, we’ve seen near-complete regression to the point where gay people are facing the death penalty. Some of those countries never won true freedom in the first place. Others used to be better than they are today.
Beyond the moral panic of anti-LGBTQ+ and abortion legislation, we’ve even seen attacks springing up against basic worker’s rights. Most especially, we’ve seen loosenings of child labour laws all across the United States.
For those of us in North America, protests won us those basic rights we’ve been taking for granted for so long. In some cases, it took outright riots and literal battles in the hills to change the world for the better.
They were not given freely. They were won with sweat, tears, marching feet, and upraised fists. They were won with vigilance and unity, solidarity against a system of oppression and disdain.
This backslide that we’re witnessing is what happens when we let our guard down.
The power of protest and collective action is legitimately awe-inspiring. It’s staggering to think about the challenges that have been overcome as a result of people coming together for a common goal.
There are times these days when things can start to feel a little overwhelming. Watching the world swing hard to the side of authoritarian and fascist thinking, the rise of hate and panic whipping up a frenzy of laws targeting already marginalized people around the globe.
It’s terrifying. It’s exhausting. Sometimes it can even feel hopeless.
But it’s only truly hopeless if we give up.
Think about the list of things that have been changed because of public pressure. Labour laws, gay marriage, civil rights, and everything in between.
People have always come together to challenge the status quo when it no longer serves the common good; and when the people have come together, they have achieved incredible things.
As world governments have begun to strip away those fought-for protections and rights, we’ve been forced into a corner. Our backs are to a wall, and we’re all under threat. We’ve been warned about this for decades.
In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. once declared; “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
He was right. When freedoms are stripped away from a few of us, the rest of us are next. James Baldwin wrote, “If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” In this letter, he raised remembrances of the Holocaust and of genocide.
Likewise, we were warned by Martin Niemöller in a poignant speech about the danger of ignoring the oppression of others. “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Every time we’ve successfully changed the world, it has been an act of solidarity. It has been the result of people from all walks of life coming together, whether they were on the chopping block or not.
We have won because people were willing to fight with one another, for one another. Not just because of self-interest, but because of a spirit of cooperation.
Our strength lies in community. Unity, not segregation and individualism.
There’s never been a war that was won by one single person working alone. Having numbers on your side is crucial.
There’s a reason big corporations fight tooth and nail to try and prevent their workers from unionizing. The last thing they want is a group of people working together to demand better conditions and pay; it’s effective, and that’s a problem.
It’s much like voting: if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t put so much time and money into trying to prevent it from happening.
Whether you’re going up against a bad boss or a bad government, showing up to the plate with a big crowd of supporters is much more likely to get results than trying to make a difference by yourself.
Protests are loud, annoying and a major inconvenience…but they also work. They get eyes on the problem, and they force you to pay attention. They get the message out to the masses, and they drive you to take action.
Being ignored is what kills a movement in the cradle.
Don’t hate public protests. It’s almost impossible to overstate how important they are in keeping our democracy running, and without them, we’d be in seriously hot water. It’s a lesson from history that we can’t afford to forget.
The moment we stop fighting for our freedom is the moment we lose it.
Solidarity wins.
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My worry now is that Trump may decide that all of this current protesting is a danger to the country and invoke the insurrection clause, deploying the national guard to quell protestors, calling them rioters. With tensions being so high in this country, this will only invite a repeat of the Kent State incident only worse.