Can Writing Change the World? Can Anything?

I hope so.

Bob Herbert, columnist for the New York Times, says if we don’t get out from in front of our computers, up off our couches, out of the gym, the office, the school, and take to communal organization, planning, and political action, we’re slowly drowning.

Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you’d watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach’s strategy or a script for “Law & Order.”

Read his inspiring, but frustrating column here.  What do you think?  This is what I think:

The reason people believe taking to the streets doesn’t work in this country is that it doesn’t.  I have taken to the streets; I was arrested in 1990 for protesting the First Gulf War in Chicopee, Massachusetts.  What impact did my actions, arrest, and subsequent court appearances have on the war?  The soldiers at Westover Air Force Base?  The police in Chicopee, Massachusetts?  The citizens of Amherst, Massachusetts as we marched through the town a week later to make our point again?  Little to none?  None?  Did it cast a negative effect, leading to the conservative backlash that led to the awful Republican Contract with America four years later?  Not my protest, of course, but the protesting, the opposition to the mainstream American policies which make even less sense today than they did then?

Millions of people across the world took to the streets in hundreds of cities before the American invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003.

“According to the French academic Dominique Reynié between the 3 January and 12 April 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 anti-war protests, the demonstrations on 15 February 2003 being the largest and most prolific.”

[Credit: BBC News] 

And what was the result of 36 million people protesting on the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld race to invade Iraq?  They were ignored.

In September, 2002, a few months before those protests, a friend asked me to go with him to a small IMF-World Bank protest in Chicago.  I was curious, so I went.  There were about a thousand protestors, herded like cattle by about four thousand police in riot gear, forming human walls of black metal shields along the sidewalks so you couldn’t leave the march even if you wanted to.  Moreover, nobody could join once the march started.  I didn’t feel like I was exercising my first amendment right to protest; I felt like we were being watched as potential criminals, and being warned by the Chicago police that they were more than willing to use force against us.  Result?  The riot gear acted a little like prior restraint. I didn’t feel like I was freely exercising my rights.  I felt unsafe, vulnerable, and isolated.

The other day, at my building in Chicago, protestors against the American Bankers Association convention gathered outside.  We got a derisive email from building security, telling us that there was a “planned demonstration” and one of the entrances would be closed.  People around the office said, “What are they protesting now?”  They.  Now.  In other words, not me.  In other words, why won’t they shut up?

If the leadership ignores protest, if the public ignores protest, if protestors are successfully cast as complainers, instead of good people doing exactly what Bob Herbert says we need to do to save our values and future, where does that leave us?  Is protest dead?

But I hope writing can change the world.  Because writing is powerful.  Just ask the censors.