Have you ever taken part? What was it and why?

In high school I was a solitary non-conformist. (I didn’t feel like conforming in my non-conformance, so I couldn’t join the various “non-conformist” cliques.) I had a punkette stage, but while I admired the DIY attitude of the punk movement (and really liked the music), I found it was basically “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. So aside from a period of questionable hair coloration (which my mother just FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT over!) I didn’t really get into anything protesty.

This changed when I hit university. In university I campaigned for an NDP candidate I believed in (until he got outed making a deal by a hot mic and I realized he was just as much a scumball as any other politician), I participated in “Take Back the Night” marches, and with my little flare for drama I partook of things that today would be called “flash mobs” where we enacted scenarios that illustrated injustices near and dear to our hearts.

There was also a HUGE protest when there was a strike mid-semester that threatened to fuck up a lot of people’s educations since for safety reasons the university had to be closed.

What protests have you felt have been effective or ineffective?

Of these, the “Take Back the Night” ones were the only ones that had any measurable impact, in that the ideals (“Hey, guys? How 'bout you don’t rape or assault women, pls K thx?”) seemed to catch on and take root to the point that the normalization of (mostly engineering students’) “No means she hasn’t had enough to drink yet!” (an actual slogan used in the engineering paper!) fell by the wayside and most people decided that “no” did actually mean “no” by the end of my stay there.

The instant dramas tended to just bewilder people; the messages were lost in the odd delivery. Artistically they worked—people liked them—but the message was never quite catching on. Now, as I close in on the end of my life spent in a marketing career mostly, I can see a hundred ways that we could have done better, but … hindsight is 20/20.

The counter-strike protest was very effective. The staff who were striking were likely very, very, very concerned with ten thousand angry students descending on their picket line and shouting so loudly from across the street that it drowned out all their noisemakers (air horns, etc.) put together. They were back at the bargaining table within 48 hours and the strike was over after only two weeks, causing only a bit of minor disruption (administratively handled) at the end of the term for some people who had jobs lined up already. It was a huge change from what seemed to be a strike that would end a term.

If you feel they are not effective in general, what would you rather people do?

I don’t feel protests are ineffective in general, but I think protests are largely ineffective because people making them don’t think. Activists tend to live in echo chambers and they lack, typically, the empathy it takes to put themselves in the shoes of those with whom they disagree so can’t see how their protests are really being taken. So you get frankly idiotic ideas like “let’s destroy works of art to protest oil!” Or “let’s hold 10-20,000 students hostage whose lives are about to be utterly fucked-up without meaningfully impacting people with comfortable six figure incomes they get whether the strike lasts a semester or not”. (If they’d chosen “work to rule” I’d have been right alongside them helping them along, but they chose instead “hold children hostage”, so fuck 'em.)

So while I think protests are good, and often entirely valuable, the majority of them are ineffective not because the cause isn’t just, and not because it’s impossible to implement them, but rather because the messaging wasn’t properly planned and focused. (For an example of bad focus leading to ineffective protests: Occupy Wall Street had no coherent demands and, indeed, when one sub-group came up with a list, the list was all over the fucking place and it wasn’t agreed to by practically every other sub-group.)

So what would I rather people do? Learn communications. Then based on that make useful, focused protests that actually effect change. Otherwise you’re wasting time and energy (and often damaging your cause … I still wince at “Pride Day” shenanigans, despite being in the community supposedly proud of it, because I think a lot of the displays are counter-productive and call the LGBTQ+ community into disrepute).

Have you ever had your opinion swayed by any form of protest?

In the '80s in Germany there were huge student housing protests. Often very violent ones. My opinion (as a late teen) was swayed by them big-time. I felt that universities had waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many students if they had the free time to go out and trash city blocks and steal things in orgies of violence. My solution to the student housing problem was to reduce the number of students. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they wanted…

I used to have a very huge anti-native (Canadian indigenous peoples) bias because … well, let’s just say living in the high arctic among several indigenous groups in a majority, while I was in a minority smaller than even the white populace there, led to a lot of bullying that scarred me for decades. It was a protest at university organized by the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College that woke me up to perhaps why the natives in the arctic were lashing out and led me to investigate and … well, it took another decade, but now I am firmly on-side of the natives in most things where they get in conflict with companies and government.

How would you try to ensure a successful protest?

• Laser-sharp focus.
• Bouncing the idea past people not in my activist echo chamber.
• Policing the crazies harshly. (“Police your crazies or be judged by them.” If anybody commits acts of violence against civilians, opportunistically performs property crimes, etc. hand them over to the fucking police ideally with the press there taking photos!)
• Keep an eye open for unintended impact that could negate any benefits from the protest, and mitigate upon appearance.

Do you feel that violent protest is mostly uncalled for?

Mostly, but not always. If the target of your protest commits violence against you, defensive violence is acceptable as long as you don’t turn into your enemy. And of course violence against the property of your target is sometimes necessary: breaking gates, sabotaging construction equipment that’s being used to tear down old-growth forest, etc. The key is to be very conservative in deciding when to use violence and how much, and to make sure that it’s done in a way that shows the real target. A good protest makes people afraid of the status quo, not of you. Violence is a thing that has a very strong tendency toward making people afraid of you so it must be used sparingly and with care.

Just for fun, what is the absolute worst protest you’ve ever heard of?

The aforementioned German student riots. They accomplished absolutely nothing but getting a bunch of students criminal records and making most of the populace think “you know, fuck those guys”.