Protests Matter

While I haven’t always felt that protests have been effective at change, they do offer the change of heart we all might need.

Although I have participated in them, I have never really been a big proponent of public protests. While it sometimes made me feel better for participating in something that I thought needed to be addressed in the world around me, I’ve never really felt that the protests I’ve attended were all that effective. The Black Lives Matter protests have changed my mind about that.

Growing up, what I remember seeing of protests was largely the footage of anti-war protests that happened a few years before I was born. I remember understanding as a child that the protests were staged by the hippies to stop the war in Vietnam. But by my thinking, since the war happened anyway, completely undeterred by signs, chants, and gatherings of people, and since the word hippies had seemed to take on some sort of negative connotation, protesting seemed pretty pointless to me.

But as an adult, the first protest I recall attending was in San Francisco. It was the summer after 9/11, and George Bush II was preparing for war. Although I and many others would go on to protest on many more occasions across the country and around the world, our cries fell on deaf ears as those who sought to benefit from war waged their war.