Occupy the Mind: Protests Should Be Designed to Scare for Effect

The Point is Not for Old Hippies to Have Fun

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The cool October air has driven me inside. It’s that time of year again, when the rotation of the earth leads to shorter days and cooler nights.

God has nothing to do with it. That’s just how our planet works.

Meanwhile on the outside, people all over the planet are finally getting off their couches and protesting the abysmal economic situation brought on by the greed and corruption of the American moneyed class.

In New York, where the protests began, the Occupy Wall Street movement celebrated when the decision was made to keep Zuccotti Park open instead of forcing the protesters out while a company cleaned the park. They feared, probably correclty, that once the crowd was dispersed, the protest would effectively end.

On Saturday night, while a majority of Americans were focused on watching football on TV, thousands of demonstrators protesting corporate greed filled Times Square. Police arrested more than 42 people.

Rallies were held in more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia, as well as in the United States. The demonstration in Rome turned violent, and more than 70 people were arrested in Manhattan on Saturday night, but crowds elsewhere were largely peaceful, according to the Washington Post.

In my home town of Birmingham, for reasons that are not clear, about 300 people marched from Railroad Park to the Five Points Fountain on Southside, according to the Birmingham News. No one was maced or arrested.

It is hard to imagine this protest doing much to scare the One Percent in Mountain Brook, however, looking down on the scene from The Club atop Red Mountain. They were probably laughing while they consumed their New York strip steaks on Saturday night, sipping their Dom Perignon champagne and aged, single malt Scotch.

It is also hard to imagine this protest doing much to shake the conservative confidence of Alabama’s leading tea party Republican, state Senator Scott Beason.

He’s the author of Alabama’s strict new immigration law, which the federal courts have refused to strike down and only weakened enough to let the schools, churches and Big Business off the hook. The court rulings even protected the Republicans from any backlash at the polls next year.

I imagine Mr. Beason had a fine time on Saturday playing golf at the Quail Ridge Golf Course at the all white “exclusive ” Castle Pines Country Club in Gardendale before heading home to watch the Alabama and Auburn games on TeeVee. Imagine the dinner conversation about a few hippies carrying signs on Southside, where most of Birmingham’s liberals live.

The reason the New York protest may be having an effect on American public opinion and politics is because the protesters are taking the pain to rich neighborhoods in that city. And their numbers are growing to a point where they cannot be ignored and laughed at.

Protesters in other cities need to understand this. It is not about having fun with a few friends marching down a safe street with signs and feeling good about doing “something.” It is better than staying home and sharing the same old Facebook pictures over and over again all day long.

But to be effective, you have to be willing to get in the face of the powerful. You have to be willing to get maced and arrested. You have to occupy the minds of those you wish to reach. They need to lose sleep at night, wake up in cold sweats, and wonder if their Golden Parachute ride is about to come to a violent end.

Anything else is just a love fest that will be as forgotten as the flower children of the 1960s, remembered now for a mud slide of a concert at Woodstock — not for changing the voting laws in America or ending the war in Vietnam.

While several thousand rallied and marched Saturday as a prelude to Sunday’s belated dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C., perhaps the protesters in Birmingham should reflect on how the Civil Rights movement made such a huge difference in Alabama — and the country — back in the 1960s.

Nobody was having much fun on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They only got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.

Picking the place to protest is as important as the timing and the manner in which it is done. Let me suggest one more time that the place to protest in Alabama is Scott Beason’s driveway in Gardendale, or maybe in downtown Mountain Brook. Hey, think about surrounding The Club. At least be willing to give the bastards a case of indigestion for one night — rather than just giving them something to laugh at on TeeVee.

A lot of us are counting on YOU to make a significant, verifiable difference now. You can do it.