At least this person is striving to figure out how to really change our country. I have two things to say to her.
First, when one protests, it matters not that no one pays any attention. Protesting for me is something I do for myself. I am expressing my dissatisfaction to the world around me. If the world around me chooses to ignore my protests, I still have tried to do something meaningful about my dissatisfaction. The act of protesting is a good in and of itself, regardless if it makes a difference.
Secondly, I would recommend getting involved with a particular cause that has some chance of actually changing our government’s policies. In my case, I’m involved with the movement to institute “clean elections”, i.e. publicly funded campaigns. The way I see things, we have to start at the beginning and, in the case of getting better leadership and public policy, the beginning starts with the way we elect the people that represent us. Another critical cause is working towards media reform so protests do get appropriate media coverage.
What we can’t do as citizens is what so many of us already do. And that is to conclude it is hopeless for little ol’ me to fix and thereby “…hardly even blink…”
What does it Mean to be a Politically Active Citizen if No One is Listening?
by Paige DoughtyOver the last five years it has come to my attention that I do not live in a “democracy.” That in fact, I have no idea what living in democracy might mean. A comment made to me during a recent conversation with a member of the press has exacerbated and confirmed this feeling on the most basic level.
“I live in D.C and I see at least one protest everyday. Protesting is not effective anymore. I hardly even blink when I see one on my way to work.”
I bit my tongue to stop myself from responding, “Well, perhaps this is the problem.”
In the year leading up to the current war in Iraq. I was living in Australia. There, I and hundreds of thousands of other people took to the streets in protest of the building momentum towards war. Similar protests took place around the world. Later that same evening as I was watching the news a rolling headline flew past my eyes on the bottom of the screen, with the words, “Thousands protest U.S. entrance into Iraq around the world, but media does not cover.” The protests were under reported, but the major corporate television station I was watching did manage to include a meager headline reporting that they were not reporting thousands of people protesting. A month later the war began.
I was born in 1980. I missed the 60′s and 70′s, often touted as the “golden age” of a politically active citizenry. Now I am 26 years old and realizing that somewhere along the way my generation missed political action class. Perhaps it fell through the public school cracks somewhere between pre-calculus and U.S. History, when we talked for an entire semester about the Civil and Revolutionary wars, and the current state of our own country was never mentioned.
The political action with which my generation is most familiar is point and click. It goes something like this: receive a barrage of “email alerts” in your inbox, follow the link to the pre-written letter to your congress person, enter your email address and click to send. Wash your hands after a hard day of work. You are a political activist and you didn’t even leave your house! This is a paltry excuse for action. But you can’t say I haven’t tried and did I mention I missed the class on political action?
Yet, what else is there to do? There are so many issues and problems, from the war in Iraq, to the war on the environment, to the war on free speech, I cannot keep up. Unless you are a member of the press vigilantly watching over every move that our government makes, both on national and local levels, there is no way for the average citizen to keep up with what is going on behind closed doors in the government hallways of this country.
As far as I understand it the realistic avenues I have to make change in my own country are to vote for two different versions of the same thing during elections (neither of whom represent most of my beliefs), to protest, and to write letters to government officials and cross my fingers that someone might actually read them. Apparently protesting is out.
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