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The SWARM...
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Protesting: Effective or Polarizing? (Ithaca Times 10/19 Editorial, You're Gonna "Love")
Ithaca is once again undergoing an active season of protests. Animal rights groups are rallying against Wegmans' egg farms, the Living Wage Coalition is close to getting 5,000 signatures and banging on Wal-Mart's door and anti-war demonstrations are becoming so prevalent that even Common Council supported the Eyes Wide Open exhibit.
We encourage all of these groups to fight for their beliefs - not because we necessarily believe in all of their goals, but because we believe in free speech. Not only is community activism one of the many things that make Ithaca great, it is, quite honestly, one of the things that makes being a newspaper in Ithaca great. But we worry that the momentum of Ithaca's activism could veer, for some, into extremism. In the last month, charges against the St. Patrick's Day Four and the Red Bud protestors have been greatly lessened. We do not disagree with these rulings, but we worry that, indirectly, these cases might encourage locals to take their protesting measures even further. This would harm not only the protestors' lives (if similar cases keep arising, judges will eventually throw the books at Ithaca's extremist protestors), but also their causes. Imagine a place that is as conservative as Ithaca is liberal. Imagine seeing anti-abortion activists pour their blood all over the floor of a government facility, or lock their arms and refuse to leave an abortion clinic. How would we view these people? Would we draw closer to their cause, or would we draw away? The point is that fundamentalism is not only a right-wing phenomenon. Protests - especially in an activist community such as Ithaca - always walk a fine line between being effective and being polarizing. Protests have encouraged and brought great changes in our city and our country. But protesting can become dangerously simple-minded very quickly, ceasing dialogue between the opposing groups. Milan Kundera, who lived under and opposed a fascist regime much of his life, wrote of a protest in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and he suggested "that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison." Kundera recognizes the conformist danger inherent in protesting. He realizes the strength and weakness of group protesting is its one-dimensionality, and we should all heed that fact as we raise our fists to pursue our various causes. |
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